Alternative song title (courtesy of The Police): Don’t Stand So Close To Me
Alternative song title (courtesy of The Police): Don't Stand So Close To Me
At the beginning it seemed so far away.
On December 31, 2019, officials in China announced a mysterious pneumonia affecting a cluster of 41 patients in Wuhan. I may have read a news article about it, but didn’t pay much attention. (Aha, I now realize that must be where the 19 comes from in COVID-19, it was the year it started!)
At the beginning of February, a cruise ship called the Diamond Princess was quarantined off the coast of Japan. The quarantine lasted for weeks, with more than 700 people sick. Wow, I thought, what a bummer for them!
On March 6, twenty-one people on its sister ship, the Grand Princess, returning from Hawaii to San Francisco, tested positive for the corona virus, so the ship was not allowed to dock anywhere. They had to remain at sea, waiting for someone to agree to take them. On March 9 they were finally allowed to dock at the Port of Oakland rather than San Francisco, because the port there was farther away from the city. Oakland residents were not happy about it, saying it was a racist decision. It took a few days to empty all the passengers off the ship. Many were taken by bus to be put in quarantine at Travis Air Force Base, not so far from Sacramento. Buses that were taking passengers to Oakland Airport drove right out onto the tarmac and loaded them onto the planes, so that they wouldn’t contaminate the terminals. Again, I read about all these developments, and felt sorry for the passengers and crew members on that ship, but it still didn’t occur to me how greatly it was going to affect me.
Things moved slowly, and then suddenly they moved quickly. Here is the chronology that I remember of the week when everything changed.
I am the coordinator of the mah jongg group at my synagogue. We meet every Monday, and each week on Sunday I send out a reminder email. On Sunday, March 8th, my email said “If you are worried about germs (which I am not), you can bring hand sanitizer – or gloves.” I obviously wasn’t taking it seriously. We played on Monday, and nobody brought hand sanitizer OR gloves. It was a very pleasant afternoon. I don’t think we even talked about the coronavirus. However, that Friday I had to send out an email saying that mah jongg was cancelled indefinitely, by order of the rabbi. At that point, with what we had learned in the interim, the idea that we would even think of getting together to play seemed ridiculous, especially since most of us are over 65, and therefore in the high-risk group.
On Monday, March 9th, I went to the Purimspiel at my synagogue. There were a lot of people there, although perhaps not as many as in other years. When the servers came around with fresh-baked hamentaschen, they were wearing gloves. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was my last public event before the crisis hit Sacramento.
I am the chair of the Harvard Schools Committee, coordinating the interviews of all high school seniors applying to Harvard throughout northeastern California. On Tuesday, March 10th, I received an email from the Admissions Office saying that Visitas, the on-campus program for admitted students, was being cancelled because of the coronavirus, and instead they would have Virtual Visitas, enabling students to “tour” the campus online. The email further said that I should not host my usual party for admitted Sacramento-area students in April. I was outraged that they would tell me I couldn’t have this party, which is one of the highlights of the year, and I privately thought I would do it anyway. Because I just didn’t get it yet.
My choir meets on Wednesdays, and we were preparing for a cabaret to be held on April 4th. On Tuesday, March 10th, one of my alto friends said she wasn’t going to come to rehearsals any more until the dress rehearsal, because she was worried about the coronavirus. I pooh-poohed her concern, and guilt-tripped her into agreeing to come the next night because I wanted to take a picture for my Finding Your Tribe story. Even she didn’t take it seriously enough, because although she had decided to skip 3 weeks of rehearsal to protect herself from the virus, she still planned to come to dress rehearsal and, of course, the performance. On Wednesday, March 11th, we got an email at 2:39 p.m. saying that there was concern about the virus, and we should sit in every other seat at rehearsal to prevent the spread of germs. However, at 4:25 p.m., less than two hours later, another email came, announcing in capital letters that rehearsal was cancelled, and the cabaret was postponed indefinitely. What was still not cancelled was a rehearsal of a smaller group which was to sing at shabbat services on the 20th. So I went to that rehearsal, and we bemoaned the loss of the cabaret, but we clustered around the piano and sang for an hour. We still didn’t comprehend what was happening. On Thursday, March 12th, that other service was cancelled, and by Friday, March 13th, it was announced that all services were cancelled for the foreseeable future (except bar and bat mitzvahs, which are likely to be sad affairs), and the rabbi and cantor would livestream services so that people could participate at home.
The monthly meeting of a Board I am on was scheduled for Monday, March 16th. On Thursday, March 12th at 4:55 pm, the president sent an email saying that we would meet at the usual time and place, but those who didn’t want to attend the meeting in person could do so by Zoom. At 7:34 pm the same day, she sent another email saying the meeting would be by Zoom only. I wrote to her to ask what had occurred in those two and a half hours to cause her to make that change rather than having it be each person’s choice, because I dislike Zoom, and I would have preferred to meet in person. She said her husband had just come home from a meeting at Sierra Health Foundation, and based on what he learned there, he thought we should avoid a face-to-face meeting.
So really, the paradigm shift in my world occurred between March 10th and March 13th.
Looking at my calendar, every single entry for the second half of March and all of April is crossed out. And most of my emails for the past week have had a subject line that starts either with CANCELLED or with COVID-19. Even businesses whose mailing list I didn’t know I was on have been writing to tell me what they are doing in response to COVID-19.
The theatres closed. The schools closed. The bakeries closed. The library closed. We went out to dinner last Friday night (the 13th), and the restaurant was surprisingly crowded. We tried to pick a table that wasn’t too close to other tables, since there actually were no empty tables. But soon after that, the restaurants closed too, except for take-out orders at some of them.
We have been given various phrases telling us how to behave. First it was social distancing. Then came shelter in place. Apparently these were not specific enough to get the desired results. On Friday, March 20th, a week after the world changed, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that everyone should just stay home. Here’s the front page of the Sacramento Bee:
And as if all that weren’t bad enough, we have ANTS in our house! An invasion of ants in the kitchen and in the master bathroom. Somehow it seems like part of the same agony as the coronavirus. It’s like these are two of the ten plagues, and I hope we don’t have to endure eight more, because I don’t think I could stand it. In the biblical ten plagues, they started out small and got progressively worse, ending with the death of the firstborn son. Surely COVID-19 must be our worst plague, so maybe we are getting them in reverse order.
And speaking of firstborn sons, mine taught me an important lesson about texting etiquette as a result of the coronavirus. On Sunday, March 15, I sent messages to my kids, asking if they were doing okay. My son texted back saying “I was gonna call you today to check in,” and then went on to describe what was going on for him. In a separate text, he then asked “How are you?” I’m not sure if I saw that second text or not before I texted back, saying “It would be great if you called.” He took that to mean there was something wrong that I didn’t want to tell him via text, and called immediately, scared about bad news. When I told him we were both fine, he chastised me for my text. First, he said, I should have said we were fine before saying it would be great if he called. Okay, that’s fair, I should have. But second, and even more important, I should not have put a period at the end of my text! Using a period at the end of a text apparently gives it much greater seriousness. I had no idea. When you finish a text you just “send” after the last word, you don’t type a period. I will try to comply and I will always associate it with COVID-19.
Suzy
I didn’t know the social etiquette of the text message either, Suzy. Guess we are just too old. The rush on groceries started here on about 3/13, tho I hadn’t been able to get hand sanitizer for over a week (I’ve never been very concerned about that in the past, so have never had any in the house). I got an email on Thursday night, 3/12 that my chorus was canceled until further notice, which make it difficult to think we’d be ready to perform on May 9. And by Sunday, March 15, the governor had declared a State of Emergency (after seeing so many kids out partying at bars for St. Patrick’s Day weekend), closed restaurants except those that could do take-out food, and, though we are not technically in lock-down, for all practical purposes we are, since we are advised to only go out for necessary items like food or medicine. No gatherings larger than 10 people. So yes, life changed on a dime. For many of us.
Wow, kids still out partying on St. Patrick’s Day weekend! Sounds like the shift may have happened a little later in Massachusetts.
We are ordering take-out from our favorite restaurant tonight, because we want to support them at a time where it’s the only business they have – and, of course, because we don’t feel like cooking on a Saturday night!
As you might imagine, Suzy, your chronology resonates with so many of us, as the crisis, and its impact, grew on a daily basis these last few weeks. But I do appreciate you sharing your particular miseries with us as company.
And thank you, too, for keeping this both lighthearted (the ants as a plague) and informative (proper texting etiquette), Though I realize, as to the former, there is nothing humorous about the ant invasion for you. That said, if you have time to kill and are looking for yet another diversion, the animated movie ANTZ from about twenty years ago is pretty good — unless you consider Woody Allen to be his own sort of plague. As to the latter, that was truly news for me, too; I’ll want to confirm it with my kids.
Finally, thank you again for the wisdom of moving up this prompt to this week. I think it has been cathartic, in the best sense of the word, for all of us on Retro.
And, since this is not a text, I will end this comment with a period without accidentally imbuing it with undeserved seriousness.
Talk about life changing on a dime! When I first suggested writing about COVID this week, most people (including you) said it was too soon. But things have gotten so much worse since that time that now it is the catharsis we all need. I’m proud of myself for being so foresighted, although of course I would never have wished for things to get so bad so quickly.
Suzy, this is such an accurate reflection of the mindset and questions we had going along. I checked my calendar and the last “large” event we went to was on March 5, a preview theater performance. I went to my Shabbat service on the 7th at a member’s home, where we didn’t have a minyan, and from then on have gone nowhere except to the doctor and the grocery store. As people might know, our county was one of the first in the nation to shelter in place after the Seattle area, so psychologically we are ahead of most of the country.
Marian, I do feel like you were talking about shelter in place before I knew it was a thing. I wondered if your paradigm shift had happened much earlier than mine, but with your dates of March 5 and 7, it sounds like it was only a few days.
With the information flowing so fast, what used to take weeks now takes days or even hours, Suzy. I must say, though, that by Leap Day Dick and I were having discussions about whether or not we should go to the theater on March 5. Also, based more on a gut feel, by then I’d started picking up extras at the grocery store, something that I don’t usually do. I think my paradigm was shifting subconsciously.
I’m impressed that you knew to be concerned as early as Leap Day, and that you thought to pick up extra groceries. I was certainly oblivious until last week, as my story shows.
A well-detailed journalistic chronology of the growing awareness we’re all going through. Now I realize I’m not sure what my last social contact was outside of my home. I took pilates on Friday the 13th (uh huh) and on Monday, although we weren’t on any mandated shelter in place/stay at home, I decided it was unwise to go back to my friend and mentor’s studio for my Monday pilates session. After that, shopped once without gloves and then shopped again with gloves. Now I walk daily, saying hello from six feet out to avoid saying hello from six feet under. Ha ha… ha.
I know I was a bit preoccupied with dates, but I needed to figure out what I knew and when I knew it. The whole thing has been so bizarre. And I like your quip about six feet out to avoid six feet under. Surprised nobody has thought of making that a meme.
I was right there with you on the chronology, Suzy, up to the 10th when I met my closest friend for dinner and we jokingly bumped elbows. Little did we know! Thanks for teaching me two things…what the 19 stands for, and the textiquette. (Hmmm, thought I just made that up but of course it’s already out there!) Anyway, I had no idea, and those periods are so pesky anyway. So all day I’ve been leaving them off and smiling about it. You were so right about doing this prompt…just what some of us needed, but now it’s late and so I’ll respond to the rest of the stories tomorrow. So thanks also for your foresight!
I know, we all jokingly bumped elbows. We just couldn’t take it seriously, it was so far outside the realm of anything we had experienced before. I AM proud of my foresight re Retrospect, although I certainly wasn’t foresighted about anything else!
Suzy, your choices of song titles are perfect. Now I can’t get them out of my head. Your chronology is amazing. Have you been keeping notes about this? Your description of how your feelings evolved from disbelief to irritation to anger over everything you lost is so relatable. Thanks for explaining the origin of COVID-19 and not using a period at the end of texts. These are indeed terrible times.
Laurie, I didn’t keep notes about it, but since all communications were by email, and I never delete my emails, all the dates and times were right there in my inbox. I felt like I needed to figure out all that chronology to help me understand the week the world changed!
Suzy, ditto all that the others have said, this is so wonderfully written, capturing just how suddenly this unimaginable scenario has unfolded.. Earlier tonight I too sat at my desk crossing off events in my datebook.
And it has hit too close to home ~ the husband of a New York friend was on the Grand Princess, thankfully he tested negative and is now on his way home.
Stay safe my friends.
Thanks, Dana. What a relief about your friend’s husband! My nephew actually got it, and posted about it on facebook. He had 3 days of feeling awful, and then recovered and I think is feeling fine now. He put up a video of himself playing the piano and singing “Corona” to the tune of “Maria” from West Side Story to show what good shape he was in!
Scary, scary, scary!