The year of living Covidly

One year ago today, I walked into a Food Lion supermarket at 10:30 p.m. to buy a couple of items. I went late at night to avoid other people, because two days earlier, West Virginia had recorded its first confirmed case of Covid-19.

In the days following that first positive case, we were advised to wear masks and gloves in public, use hand sanitizer frequently, wash our hands regularly, touch elbows instead of shaking hands and stay six feet away from other people. I wouldn’t have gone to the store at all except that the items were necessities, so I took a chance on sneaking in just before they closed. It worked out, because there was only one clerk working at the time and only one other customer who was several aisles ahead of me. I bought what I needed and left.

Since that day, other than to keep necessary doctor appointments, I basically haven’t gone anywhere that required me to get out of my car. I’m talkin’ nowhere, no how, at no time and thank you very much.

Instead of going places like I used to, I now use the drive-up windows at the pharmacy and the bank, the pickup service at the supermarket and the big blue mailboxes on the sidewalk outside the Post Office. I buy things from Amazon that I used to get at Big Lots and I haven’t seen the inside of a restaurant or a store since March 19, 2020.

I also haven’t seen my children or my grandchildren or most of my friends. I did go outside to walk our dog every day until she died, but I wore a bandana around my neck that I could pull up into a mask if I encountered another person, which I rarely did. We skipped trick-or-treat and Thanksgiving dinner with the family, and we don’t answer the door to solicitors. My wife and I spent Christmas together … alone.

I haven’t seen a live sporting event, a movie, a concert or a festival of any kind. When people come to mow my lawn or shovel my snow, I pin their money to the mailbox and stay inside. I did have to allow a man from AAA into my garage once to jump-start my wife’s car, but I stayed away from him as much as possible and lived to tell the tale. 

The past year has been the closest thing to isolation I can think of. It has been, to borrow from a famous movie title, My Year of Living Covidly.

I did what I did for one simple reason: A year ago at this time, I was convinced that I was going to die. Listening to the medical experts who weren’t either silenced or ridiculed by that former president, it was clear that my wife and I fell into several high-risk categories that made us prime candidates for hospitalization, the ICU, a ventilator and eventual death. We were both over the magic age, either smokers or former smokers with high blood pressure and other pre-existing conditions.

I said at the time that I was afraid of this virus, and that anybody who wasn’t afraid of it should have been. I’m not ashamed to say those words now any more than I was back then. So we did what we thought we needed to do to keep ourselves alive, even when Trumpaloons, anti-maskers and other far-right nutbags mocked us as being “snowflakes” or made fun of our fears.  

But we survived … and now it’s time to begin Year 2.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I received our second doses of the Pfizer vaccine. We were grateful to be given appointments as early as we were and we both came through the procedure relatively unscathed. While I know that this particular vaccine is not 100% effective, and that the Covid virus is mutating into at least four new variants, at least I can say that having been fully vaccinated, I no longer fear that death is imminent.

That said, you’d think that by now we’d be on the road to normalcy with vaccinations running at the pace they are and more effective treatments being found for those people who do contract the virus, and we would be if everybody was playing by the same set of rules. Sadly, though, we are not.

According to the news, about a quarter of the country is refusing to take the vaccine because they don’t trust the government or they didn’t vote for Joe Biden or they think it causes Covid or because they’re just too stupid to think up a reason other than “because I just ain’t gonna take it.”

In addition, thousands of people are still refusing to wear a mask or follow safety precautions, including all of those college students celebrating spring break and St. Patrick’s Day and any other reason they can conjure up to have a mass gathering somewhere, plus mega-church attendees and obstinate under-educated “patriots” who think that god gave them rights to do as they damn well please. On top of that, you’ve got Republican governors who have decided to open up businesses and restaurants to 100% capacity and to overrule health officials who have pressed for universal mask mandates.

So what’s it all mean?

It means that after a full year of trying to do the right thing, my wife and I and others like us now face a second spring and a second summer of semi-isolation waiting for herd immunity to kick in because up to half of the country doesn’t care about anybody but themselves. It means we’ll still be wearing masks and avoiding crowds and washing our hands a lot after getting packages or mail, using drive-up windows and supermarket pickups and, god forbid, Amazon.com.

It means that it’s way too early to pretend that the virus is going away when, in fact, it may be mutating into something far worse than we’ve already seen. And it means that another surge is just around the corner as Memorial Day approaches, followed by the Fourth of July, Labor Day, the start of school, football season and 27 other reasons why protecting our collective selves against the ‘Rona takes a back seat to having fun, celebrating our “freedoms” and making sure that the virus hangs around for another year … or two.

The good news, if there is any, is that more than 100 million people have received the vaccine already, placing the Biden team well ahead of what he promised they would do. Our greatest hope right now is that the administration keeps working to vaccinate everybody by the end of summer, and that somebody can convince a lot of anti-vaxxers that taking it is a good idea.

At least, that’s my greatest hope, but just between you and me, I’ll be waiting and watching here at home—where I’ve been since March 19, 2020—and I won’t be holding my breath. 

Excerpt #6: ‘The Last Case’

I drove to the newspaper office around 7 o’clock and met Lucy in the lobby. She was sitting on a sofa placed there for visitors, reading text messages on her phone and holding a thick file folder full of papers. She was wearing a short brown corduroy skirt the color of a Hershey Bar, a tan turtleneck sweater with the sleeves pushed up on her arms and a pair of dark brown shoes with a three-inch heel that made her taller, but still short. Her long black hair was parted in the middle and swirled perfectly around her head and shoulders, and she was once again wearing a whole bunch of necklaces of varying lengths.

I was dressed in casual gray slacks, a bright red t-shirt with a white Aerosmith logo on the front and my badly worn leather bomber jacket. The gray slacks had been hiding in the back of my closet for months, and I liberated them so Lucy wouldn’t think I was living on the street. As for the shirt and jacket—well, I’ll only go so far as a slave to fashion.

We went for Chinese this time and Lucy told me about her geek friend Simpkins, who thought she was Chinese and not Korean. “You know us slants,” she said, mockingly referring to her Asian eyes. “We all look alike.”

“You look perfect to me,” I said. “Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Outer Mongolian, who cares. You could be from Jupiter as far as I’m concerned.”

“Well, thanks for saying Jupiter and not Uranus,” Lucy said.

“The thought did cross my mind,” I confessed. “I love yours.”

“My anus?”

“Your rings.”

“That’s Saturn.”

“Them, too.”

Before we preserve our culture and heritage, let’s acknowledge what they are

Let’s talk for a while about “culture and heritage.”

Those two words have become quite popular these days among white supremacists, neo-Confederates, young Nazi wannabes, the Republican Party and Fox News hosts, all of whom have taken up the cause to preserve our culture and heritage by bringing back the “good old days.” But I contend that before we think about preserving our heritage, we should first try to understand what that means, because in my world, if people actually did understand it, we’d find it’s not really worth restoring after all.

First off, I do believe that we should study our culture and heritage, or, as most normal people call it, our history. We should make an honest effort to educate the under-educated adults who get their news from right-wing opinion and blog sites and Facebook group chats with their crazy cousins and friends. And we should teach it in schools so our children understand it as well. But a little knowledge can go a long way, which is a nice way of saying the more we learn about our “culture and heritage” the less we should want any part of it.

To make my point, please allow me to recount the condensed version of early American history in a few short paragraphs:

It started in the 1400s or thereabouts when shiploads of white European emigrants crossed the Atlantic Ocean to establish settlements in “the new world.” They landed on soil that would become the United States, claiming the territory for England or Spain or whatever European flag they flew under, and set about building homes and churches and forts and what have you on land they believed was theirs.

The problem is, the “new world” they thought they had discovered was actually a pretty old world that was already inhabited by various tribes of native people who settled the territory 15,000 years ago (or more) and believed that the land was theirs to use, but not to own. So Job #1 for the white men who landed here was to eliminate the natives by killing them or enslaving them or otherwise chasing them off the land they had occupied peacefully for several centuries.

Once they had taken over the land, these white people started farms where they planted crops and tended animals, but it didn’t take long to discover that planting and harvesting crops was pretty hard work, so the white people went off looking for some help. A few of them sailed over to Africa, where they kidnapped boatloads of black people who they enslaved, brought back here and forced to work for free.

Skip ahead a few years to a time when the white people started running out of land in the eastern part of the country, so they started expanding their territory westward, which they called their “manifest destiny.” This westward movement required them to kill or displace even more native people along the way and to claim any property they came across. When they arrived in the west, they needed to possess even greater chunks of land, so they fought a war with Mexico, stole some land that became Texas (they called it “annexation”) and settled the war by paying Mexico a pittance for the vast territory that we know today as California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona and parts of New Mexico and Colorado. An estimated 5,000 Mexican soldiers and 4,000 civilians were killed and thousands more were wounded.  

So now the white people had land in the east and land in the west but no easy way to connect the two, so they decided to build a railroad linking the two halves of their new home. Railroad work was even harder than farming, so the white people didn’t want to do that either. Instead, they enlisted their black slaves and hundreds of Chinese workers to do the work for them … again for little or no pay.

Finally, in the late 19^th century, things had come together and the white settlers had themselves a big, fine country where they could live – a country that had been built on the backs of the black, brown, yellow and red people they killed, enslaved or otherwise coerced to do their work for them while they themselves rose to the top of the food chain. To celebrate this accomplishment, the white people put themselves in charge of everything, including the government they had founded with a Constitution that still permitted slavery, treated minority people as 3/5 of a human, and told women they couldn’t vote, work, sit on juries, have an opinion, go to school or enjoy any of the other benefits the white men granted to themselves.

Women were allowed to cook, clean house, make babies and care for their husbands but were not considered equal in any way. This, sadly, was the beginning of those “good old days” that the white men still long for today.

In the years since, the United States of America has had 46 presidents and all but one of them was a white man. All of our vice presidents were white men until last year, when a woman of color was elected, and Congress, for the most part, has traditionally been old and mostly white, but is now becoming much more diverse with women and minorities capturing seats.

All of this diversification has become very threatening to the white men who wish to remain in charge, and they got really scared when someone told them that in a few years, America would no longer be a white majority country, such was the rate of immigration by people of color. So what did the white men do? They elected a racist president whose first official acts were to ban Muslims from entering the country, start building a wall on the southern border to keep out brown people and lock immigrants and children who did get through inside cages indefinitely.  

This anti-immigrant, anti-minority posture continued for four years and emboldened the aforementioned white supremacists, neo-Confederates, Nazi wannabes and Republicans who began to come out from under their rocks and openly support discrimination against minorities, suppression of minority votes and even an attempt to overthrow the government on the day that the results of the presidential election were certified.

I could go on all day about that, but here’s a brief recap: White people came to America in the 1400s and took over the territory by killing, raping, robbing, stealing, coercing, enslaving, strong-arming and going to war against anybody who got in their way. They even fought a war among themselves over the issue of slavery, then assassinated the president who put an end to it.

Now we’re faced with a reinvigorated movement of very dangerous people who want to “preserve our culture and heritage,” to the extent that they would bring back all of the dark days of the past just to retain their place as the nation’s white ruling class. To that, I can only say one more thing: If “preserving” it means storing it away in the history books and libraries where it belongs, then I guess I can go along with that. Meanwhile, the rest of us can learn from our mistakes and move ahead to the reality of life in the 21st century ... and accept the cultural advancements that accompany that growth.

Excerpt #5: ‘The Last Case’

One Tuesday afternoon, a woman named Wanda Watkins hired me to kill her husband.

She said she had seen a flyer with my name and number posted on the bulletin board at her book club. That was puzzling, because I never made a flyer of any kind and I had no idea where Wanda Watkins went to read books. It seemed that someone was going around town marketing my services for me and I didn’t know who it was. I knew I wasn’t paying anyone to do that, so this was another mystery I needed to solve. I filed it away for future reference and turned my attention to the case. 

Now I’m not entirely sure what Wanda believed private detectives do, but she somehow got the idea that spousal assassination was in our job descriptions. Maybe she watched a lot of late-night TV movies, I don’t know. Not only was she wrong about my portfolio of services, she was way off on my price, assuming that I did kill people for money, which I don’t. She only offered me $500.

“I want it to look like a robbery,” Wanda said. (That’s the oldest trick in the book.) “I’ll leave the back door unlocked. You come in before 6, mess the place up a bit, take some jewelry out of the master bedroom—I’ll leave it out for you—and steal the money Stan hides inside a pair of argyle socks in his chest of drawers. There should be a couple of hundred in there. When he gets home, I don’t care how you kill him as long as you’re sure he’s dead before you leave. Shoot him, stab him, hang him from the shower rod, for all I care. What weapon do you guys normally use?”

I had to look away to keep myself from laughing out loud.

Excerpt #4: ‘The Last Case’

I went to the newspaper office to collect some information and was referred to the City Hall reporter, a very attractive Asian-American woman named Lucy Lee. Lucy was 24 years old, about five-foot-two in good shoes and appropriately proportioned in a small person kind of way. She had dark eyes, flawless Asian skin the color of an early summer tan, a pouty lower lip and slightly imperfect teeth that were white enough and bright enough but weren’t all perfectly straight. The lips and teeth combined with her smooth tan cheekbones to give her a very happy, playful and seductive smile.

The day I met her she had come to the office early to work on a story for the Sunday edition. She was dressed casually in a pair of low-rise distressed blue jeans; a slightly pink scoop neck t-shirt that exposed two inches of her midriff; and a long, camel and brown shirt-jacket, unbuttoned, with sleeves that were pulled up and held in place by straps that were sewed on as part of the shirt and buttoned at the elbow. I think it had epaulets, too. Or maybe not. The shirt wasn’t the focus of my attention.

Her jet black hair was pulled up high in a long ponytail that made her look like another Lucy, the actress Lucy Liu. She wore long dangling earrings with a turquoise butterfly at the top and a tiny gold ball at the bottom, a locket on a short gold chain around her neck and three or four longer chains of varying lengths…. She wore several bracelets on her left wrist and a garnet-studded ring on the middle finger of her left hand which told me she wasn’t married. When I sat down at her desk and she leaned forward to shake my hand, her hair smelled like apricot shampoo. That was when I started liking apricots.