ill this mind-numbing monotony ever end? The days have started to blend together with a maddening sameness that I’m sure will eventually send us screaming into within less than 6 feet from another human being, for the sweet release from all this waiting, waiting, waiting.
It’s true that it’s only been three days, and we’re both retired so we are pretty much spending our days like we normally do, but the fact that we have to stay huddled at home due to an external threat, rather then just our normal lethargy and misanthropy, is vexing.
I haven’t read this. Any good?
The Metropolitan Opera (whose simulcast performances I used to love to attend at the local cinema, back in the Days of Normalcy) has shut down for the entire month of March. Instead, they are offering free streaming of old performances to opera-starved fans. I tried to log into one of these, but got a message that there would be a delay connecting, so please be patient, and I was number 22,483 in line. I disconnected and tried my luck later, and it said I was number 391,044 in line. So much for that!
Scott L—— courtesy Wes L——
Other knots of survivors are slowly sending out messages of hope. In solidarity with them, we are no longer wearing pants.
Since our gym is now closed like most everything else, I decided to try out the big eyesore elliptical machine that impedes movement into and out of our bedroom. We got it decades ago in some self-delusion that we could get fit if we just spent enough money. I don’t remember how it got in, but it is too big to move now even if we wanted to. But at last it has come in handy! I pumped on it for about 45 minutes (don’t want to overdo it or I won’t get back on tomorrow), then had a bracing shower. Felt good!
We’re not exactly alone—the solitude I observed early yesterday morning didn’t last. By the afternoon, many of the kids who would have been in school if the schools hadn’t shut down decided that a jaunt to our little beach would be in order (and who can blame them, or their harried mothers?). So they frolicked and footballed while we watched from our house, counting the number of physical contacts and mentally measuring the social distance between each little germ-carrier.
– Day 2 of Dorn and Kathleen’s Cower-in-place journal (3/17/2020).
hen I woke up this morning and took a look around outside, the air was clear and calm, and the bay was still. Because most of our neighbors either work for a living, or have only their “weekend” house down here, this weekday morning was like many: there wasn’t a soul in sight. I didn’t see anyone for the time it took me to drink a whole cup of coffee. I could easily imagine that the disease had already passed through, and I was looking out at an unpopulated landscape. It was calming and creepy at the same time.
Peg O’ My Heart (1933)
We watched an old movie in bed. In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, they were showing Peg O’ My Heart with Marion Davies as an Irish orphan—orisshe? It included a timely (but bad) influenza joke from the comic relief character, who described it as a jolly good “wheeze”:
“I opened the door, and in flew Enza!”
(This was apparently a stale joke even in 1933. It seems to have been a common skip-rope chant in 1918, the year of the Spanish Flu pandemic, and had its roots well before that.)
Later I had to break quarantine to get some medicine from the vet, so I also stopped at the Giant. There was milk there, but no meat, flour but no sugar. Still no hand sanitizer or toilet paper to be seen, but I did find the last bottle on the shelf of rubbing alcohol—with wintergreen!
I was there only to get the items we absolutely needed for an extended isolated stay, so I didn’t dally. We had agreed to full Andromeda Strain protocol, where I would march straight into the shower when I got back and do a full head-to-toe before even taking the groceries out of the car.
I wasn’t nervous going into the grocery store—everyone seemed normal and unpanicked out in the real world (but everysinglecustomer wiped down his or her shopping cart handlebars). But then Kathleen called me to remind me of the shower protocol, and how important it was to take it seriously because of all the risk factors and the lack of hospital capacity, and the store (which I was still in the middle of) started seeming more and more sinister. Get me out of here!
Back home, we watched more black and white movies, and tried to make a dent in the (virtual) pile of library e-books we had remotely checked out. In keeping with our psychological need to eat differently from when we weren’t under plague alert, we cooked some chili for supper. And that’s about it.
– In which Dorn records his and Kathleen’s experiment with self‑isolation.
Prologue:
I. The libraries and schools in our county have been shut down since last week, due to the threat of coronavirus. Today our governor ordered that restaurants, bars, gyms and the like are also to be shut down, at least through the end of the month.
II. Some of my siblings and niblings just returned from a jaunt to our ancestral grounds in Norway. (That trip, and its harrowing escape back to the US as the virus was closing borders all around them like the jaws of a gigantic bear trap, is a hearty adventure tale in itself, that I’m hoping one or more of them will write.) They are all back in the US now, and in accordance with the latest wisdom, they are self-quarantining for 14 days before visiting any old people.
One of those siblings is Lona, and one of the places she’s quarantined out of is her own house, because her husband Gordon, who is fully as old as she is, lives there. Today Lona started sharing her quarantine journal on Facebook.
Kathleen and I haven’t been out of the country lately, or (to our knowledge) in contact with any corona-positives (or “Cee-Pees”), but decided it would be wise to socially-distance ourselves away in our little country cottage, “The Lotus Eatery”.
Lona’s example has inspired us to start our own “Cowering in Place” journal.
Cowering in Place, day 1 (3/16/2020).
Having joined in the fun of panic-buying last week, we are confident of having enough toilet paper to last out several extra days of the zombie apocalypse. We’re stocked with foods fresh, frozen, and imperishable. No milk, but plenty of that kind of canned tuna that we don’t like.
One of the universally acknowledged rules of cowering in place is that you have to eat differently than you would normally. So, we pulled the old Spiralizer off the top shelf, dusted it off, and made lo-o-ong strings of spaghetti out of all the veges we could find: zucchini, carrots, beets, pickles. We weren’t brave enough to process the broccoli in the fridge, and the celery and mushrooms just wouldn’t cooperate.
Mixing this with some lemon juice, feta and oil made a tasty salad, that when cooked became a delicious mirepoix. We learned that the safest (perhaps the only safe) way to eat it was with a snail fork (perhaps a tuning fork could be substituted) in one hand and a pair of kitchen scissors in the other.
* * *
The stock market has been spooked by the whole coronavirus thing, which has sent my IRA teetering. I had calibrated my contributions to it down to the penny, so that I didn’t have to work an hour longer than needed to give me an IRA that lasted exactly as long as I did.
You would think that the fear of an unexpectedly early demise from the Chinese Flu would cancel out the fear of living longer than my IRA, but oddly enough it didn’t. Instead, by some weird calculus of human psychology, the two fears were added together! (Bet you didn’t see that coming!)
So we called our IRA guy and asked him to advise us about the money in the IRA. He came armed with charts, graphs, and future projections. ˆ”See?” he told us, “you’re still on track for meeting your retirement goals, despite this market tumble.”
“But what if one of us gets sick?” I asked. “Excellent question! Let’s plan for that! How about we have Kathleen go into a nursing home at this point, and then die at this point three years later. Let’s re-do the math, and …. great, you’re still fine!” (He really said that.)
This was very comforting to me, although Kathleen didn’t seem as reassured. “Why am I the one who gets to die?” “It’s only reasonable,” I said, “I’m the one who arranged the videoconference.”
But she still didn’t seem reconciled to our new plan. I didn’t say it aloud, but i think she was letting her cabin fever jitters get in the way of rationally planning what was best for All Concerned. And it’s only day 1!!
Are you keeping a Cowering in Place Journal? If so, it seems like a good topic for a GUEST POST! Let us know!
saw a notice of a new book published just last week, How to wash dishes by Peter Miller. From the blurb, it sounds to be full of be-here-now wisdom, to teach you how to find joy in the simple things. It got me pondering the highs and lows of my 60+ years of washing dishes.
(Admittedly, the highs aren’t that high and the lows aren’t that low. It’s washing dishes.)
Buddhists (well, one Buddhist at least) say that washing dishes can be contemplative, even zen. Thich Naht Hanh wrote a piece (here) describing the benefits he gains from washing dishes.
He says “the idea that doing dishes is unpleasant can occur only when you aren’t doing them. Once you are standing in front of the sink with your sleeves rolled up and your hands in the warm water, it is really quite pleasant.” This sounds plausible, though it strains my credulity when he describes the pleasure of washing dishes every day for a hundred monks in an unheated mountain monastery, where the only materials he had to scour the dishes were, apparently, ice, and dirt.
Another story of washing dishes hard way is found in the delightful movie Cold Comfort Farm (1995) with Kate Beckinsale and Ian McKellen. The movie reminded me of a P. G. Wodehouse comedy, without as many intricate plot twists but otherwise with all the class spoofing and other satisfactions. It was based on a 1932 book of the same name by Stella Gibbons, about newly-orphaned Flora’s visit to, and transformation of, the bleak and dissipated Sussex farm of the title.
One of my favorite scenes from the movie was Flora’s attempt to get the handyman Adam to use a scrub brush, instead of a twig pulled from the thorn tree in the yard, to wash the dishes. Here’s how that’s described in the book:
“Oh, Adam, here’s your little mop. I got it in Howling this afternoon. Look, isn’t it a nice little one? You try it, and see.”
He took it between his finger and thumb and stood gazing at it. His eyes had filmed over like sightless Atlantic pools before the flurry of the storm breath. His gnarled fingers folded round the handle. “Ay. . . ’tes mine,” he muttered. “Nor house nor kine, and yet ’tes mine. . . . My little mop!” He stood staring at it in a dream.
“Yes. It’s to cletter the dishes with,” said Flora, firmly, suddenly foreseeing a new danger on the horizon.
“Nay. . . nay,” protested Adam. “’Tes too pretty to cletter those great old dishes wi’. I mun do that with the thorn twigs; they’ll serve. I’ll keep my liddle mop in the shed, along wi’ our [cows] Pointless and Feckless.”
(It’s funnier in the movie (and the book) than this little snippet does justice.)
To stray a bit further off-topic, my favorite running joke from the movie (and the book) is the war-cry of crazy Great Aunt Ada Doom: “I SAW SOMETHING NASTY IN THE WOODSHED!”
Moral: if you haven’t, see the movie, or read the book!
* * *
not my childhood chore wheel
My own memories of washing dishes are fond. When I was growing up, I had a regular chore of washing the dishes in the house. We had wheel-of-fortune like chore wheel to decide how the jobs were to be distributed among the five kids each day. One was washing the supper dishes, so (I assume) I must have washed dishes approximately one day out of every five.
Only we didn’t call it a chore wheel. It was known in our house as a “Kaper Chart”. This term originated in the Girl Scouts, and I have to admit that as a branding idea, it’s genius. Nobody likes doing chores, but kapers, now, that sounds zany, adventurous and a bit capricious (the words “capricious” and “kaper” come from the root, clearly). Taking out the trash? Watch out for bandits!
You ask, how do I know so much about Girl Scout arcana? My mother was a Girl Scout leader, my three sisters were Girl Scouts, and I and my brother were younger brothers to girl scouts. If you didn’t grow up with Girl Scout big sisters, it’s hard to do justice to the inexorable pressure you felt to do things the Girl Scout Way.
Back in the day there was actually a Girl Scout merit badge for making your little brother do things. Here is the actual badge, shown for scale next to the Washing Dishes merit badge.
Younger Scouts might be excused for not knowing about the Bossing Your Younger Brother merit badge, because its name was changed sometime in the late 60’s with the reemergence of feminist activism, to a more ambitious name like “Leadership” or something like that. I’m pretty sure all three of my sisters earned the BYYB badge.
When I was a bit older, I remember trying dishwashing as a pick-up line. We were in some sort of pseudo-domestic setting that young adults sometimes find themselves in, perhaps actually washing dishes, and I got into a debate with an attractive young woman about the proper temperature to do the rinsing. She espoused a good cold-water rinse; at the time, I was a hot-rinse man.
Nowadays, the debate would quickly devolve into an internet search, and indeed now there are treatises on that very subject available, such as this article. Apparently the whole thing is a trade-off between the mechanical force provided by the water (which is higher for COLD water) and its dissolving power (which is higher for HOT water).
But I had no access to such facts back then, and a good thing too, because if I had offered it I would have come off as a pompous know-it-all (which those of you who don’t know me might be willing to attest I am not).
Instead, I choose to believe that what I actually argued was, “Yes, I think you might be right. You are very insightful.” Whatever I said, it clearly didn’t work, because I never saw this young woman again.
* * *
Let me close with the subject of not washing the dishes. There are three instances where washing dishes are not advised:
(1) I heard somewhere, probably an old Columbo episode, that when you are making fine aged whiskey, you don’t want to wash out the barrels in between use. I don’t know if that’s really true, and frankly I don’t want to risk finding out it’s not true, so I’m not looking it up.
(2) There are cultures where the keeping and using of dirty dishes is considered a sign of manliness. Witness the following scene in a rowdy Klondike bar, from an averagely-funny example of the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby “Road” movies, The Road to Utopia (1946):
(3) There’s only one instance I know about from my own experience. But I really know it—it was pounded into me every day for the twenty years that I spent working for the Navy. Thou shalt NOT wash thy coffee cup!
I worked for many years at Navy R&D labs, and every day I fortified myself with a several cups of strong, thick Navy coffee, and I never washed my mug, if I knew what was good for me. The only maintenance that mug got was that every few years, when its holding capacity got measurably lower, I would send it over to the machine shop to be re-bored. I’m not making this up: here’s a whole thought-piece on the subject.
That’s it! Thanks for reading. Stay well! Dorn 3/13/2020
P.S. Readers who have persevered to the end of this post: (a) thank you, you have great staying power; and (b) you probably noticed that this post was really about washing dishes (if it can be truly said to be about anything), and didn’t have anything to do with having slept on ice cream. You deserve an explanation.
My sister Tara (who, being younger than me, earned her BYYB merit badge on our brother Roal) asked me where I get my ideas for posts. I don’t always know, but sometimes I think of a title first, and then try to figure out if I can write a post around it.
I didn’t do that in this case. I had started writing the post, and had a working title (“Lemonade—in a dirty glass!”). Then Kathleen contributed the title sentence, while she was describing the effect that eating a cup of caramel swirl ice cream late the night before had on her insomnia.
“I slept on ice cream last night” is just objectively a better title than my original in every way but one. (That one way being, of course, that it bears no relation to the content of the piece.)
I have a list of other possible titles, including some that seem really good but I can’t think of any appropriate content, so be warned this could happen again.
