– 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.
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—or is she? 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 every single customer 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.
Thanks,
Dorn
3/17/2020