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Like many other people confined to our homes at this time, I
want to use my time wisely. So I decided to learn to play the bagpipes. I’m not
musical, but how hard can bagpipes be? I’m taking lessons on YouTube. I don’t
actually have any pipes to practice on so I’ve been practicing using the cat.
My husband has gone back to learning the trombone after giving that a rest for
several years. The police stopped by last night to see if we need to be tested
for the virus since the neighbors reported that we sound like we’re in pain. On
the contrary, our lungs are fine. You could scarcely think of an instrument
that requires more lung power than a bagpipe or a trombone.
People have come up with creative if not productive uses for
their time locked in the house. My neighbor planted her vegetable garden weeks
too early so she has to continuously cover and uncover the tender plants as we
keep having killing frosts, but it keeps her busy. My father is reading the
Encyclopedia Britannica because he actually owns a full set and he can’t get
out to the library. (I think his edition still says Pluto is a planet.) My
husband is working his way through every movie Bogart ever made, including the
1955 comedy We’re No Angels and the
1938 hillbilly musical Swing Your Lady,
purported to be the worst film Bogey ever acted in. My daughter and I made soup
together on a screenchat and plan to do more cooking in the future. Many
afternoons I read a story to my grandson before his nap, much to the apparent
delight of his baby brother who hollers and waves his arms in excitement when I
make silly voices and show the pictures.
I’m shipping care packages to my family. I have a FedEx
account so they come right to my door to pick up outgoing boxes. I told my
daughter in L.A. that I want to send her some magazines and a couple of books
and she asked me to throw some toilet paper into the box. I sent the
grandchildren books, beanbags, and Tinker toys. I’ll send pastries and thriller
novels to Dad (the Encyclopedia Britannica is not particularly suspenseful). I plan
to send pesto and olives to my children. I put this food up last summer thinking
to share it and now it’s on me and my husband to consume it before the garden
bursts forth again this summer. I wish I could FedEx frozen peaches but once
they defrost they make for a rather sorry package. The peach trees in my yard
are flowering and I haven’t made nearly enough of a dent in last year’s bounty.
Oh well. I can think of a worse fate than an overabundance of peaches.
My younger son and his girlfriend built a fort out of
furniture and blankets in their living room. They go inside to read, listen to
music, and watch movies on the computer. They gave me a tour of it on Zoom. We
used to build forts like that when he was a little boy. It looks so cozy that I
wish I could go to his house and sleep in the fort. He is spending a lot of his
corona-shut-in time making music, not the bagpipe or trombone variety; more
like the synth variety. He describes his music as “house music,” which I
imagine is exactly the best kind of music to make while shut inside the house.
Two producers in Europe have put out vinyl albums of his work, so apparently he
knows what he’s doing.
The lucky people who can do so are working from home. Lots
of people, from doctors to late night comedy hosts, are going to work in their
pajama bottoms. For the first time, Trevor Noah can appear in public in a
hoodie without risking getting shot. Working from home is nothing new to me. I
have worked from home writing a form of creative nonfiction (narrative is
narrative) as a grant writer for twenty years. I’m a bit of a recluse to begin
with so my life has changed little under lockdown. I used to go out once a week
to the natural foods store, four times a week to the gym, and once a week to
the library. So I skip the gym and the library and voila, I’m in lockdown. (I
have been exercising at home with free weights.) But now everyone is living on
online chat and wants me to participate. I’m not used to all this social
activity. It’s exhausting. It’s stressful. I have to check my teeth for lettuce.
I did a Zoom Passover Seder with family in five states and Canada. We do a
weekly cost-to-coast family Zoom. I have a weekly Zoom movie group, monthly
Zoom book group, and several Zoom synagogue services and events every month. A
group of friends in my local Deaf and signing community are organizing a weekly
ASL Zoom. Friends near and far keep coming out of the woodwork inviting me to
reconnect through screenchat, which is particularly challenging since I have
math anxiety and calculating the time differences makes me break out in a cold
sweat, especially between here and, say, Thailand (what day is it there?). It’s
like those scary logic problems from the SAT:
“If Calvin travels West from Bangkok at 50 miles per hour and Alvin travels
East from Denver at 60 miles per hour then who will be in Scotland afore ye?”
Many of my friends and relatives have retired. Others are
out of work until the lockdown ends. They have time on their hands. I’m still
working here, people, and I’m up to my eyeballs writing a crop of brand new
federal emergency relief grants for universities trying to help their students
survive this debacle (thousands of students have been left homeless and food
insecure when their college closed) and for healthcare providers to convert to
telehealth. Why we aren’t further along with telehealth at this point in
history staggers the imagination. The fact that someone would have to risk a
coronavirus exposure event to take their baby to the doctor in person for
antibiotics for an ear infection defies logic.
With the rise of screenchat, I have had to make adjustments
to the fact that I’m now visible to my correspondents. This comes at a time
when I can’t get a professional haircut and I’m improvising with a pair of
scissors. Thank goodness I have curly hair because it doesn’t show so much if I
do something foolish, it just makes me look more intellectual. Interestingly, I
have noticed many women have started showing their gray hair now that they
can’t get it colored. I think their gray hair looks terrific. I had to upgrade
my attire. I don’t have to appear highly professional, but I do have to stop
looking like a back-to-the-land commune escapee. I threw out two shmata dresses that I have crawled
around the house in for years. I kept one to wear when I watch movies with Ron
in the evening because my cat likes to sit on me and she sheds as if she thinks
it’s an Olympic sport and she’s a gold medalist. (This detracts from her
practical use as a substitute set of bagpipes.)
Last month when I wrote about the coronavirus, I considered
the possibility that the virus is nature’s way of slowing the destruction of
the planet perpetrated by humans with the climate chaos we have wrought. As
human endeavor has slowed and stopped, CO2 emissions have dropped dramatically
and the air is fit to breathe again. Now, a few days ago, Pope Francis said he
wonders if the coronavirus is one of nature’s responses to humans ignoring the
ecological crisis we face. He went further than calling this one of nature’s
responses and even speculated that it could be “the revenge of nature.” Call me
boastful, but you heard it here from me first. (Do you think the pope reads my
blog?) This begs the question, should I be made pope? I’d be the first Jewish
pope who plays the bagpipes. Extraordinary measures for extraordinary times. The
thought I want to leave you with is this:
pay attention and make a note of the things that are different from the
usual that you want to keep, to continue doing, when this moment passes and you
can go out of your house again. Make use of this down time to imagine what
could change for the future. These could be the first days of a better world. Stay
well.
