64. “Freedom"

 One day after quarantine  

I’m home again, had a nice steak dinner with my two grandsons, who’ve safely quarantined here while I was doing so at a friend’s cabin. The grandson who tested positive and set this whole thing in motion had a few days of mild symptoms, but is healthy now. We’ll have turkey on Thursday, quietly.

This morning the radio news said that a million people each day are crowding into airports and airplanes going somewhere else for Thanksgiving. A piece in the Washington Post profiled a more conservative cross-section of Americans who are making accommodations—space heaters in patios, individual serving plates, zoom Thanksgivings. One woman said her husband would not be joining a smaller, masked group for the traditional dinner because he was “grumpy” that his presidential candidate had lost, and refused to agree to the precautions for the holiday meal.

My first thoughts were with the millions who are traveling, and then to the woman’s husband and the red-hatted people,who’ve become ubiquitous on TV with shouts for “freedom”: freedom to go on eating, drinking, and celebrating—and traveling—like they did in some idealized past. 

What do those freedoms have to do with the Martin Luther King, John Lewis, and the Freedom Marchers we watched on TV last night as I described the Civil Rights movement and the leaders I’d followed and idolized to my grandson! John Lewis wanted the freedom to vote, without having to correctly guess the number of jellybeans in a jar or reciting parts of the constitution. Nelson Mandela waited 27 years in prison for the freedom to participate in the life of his country without the walls of apartheid.

How do you measure those freedoms with the freedom to travel and crowd and breathe close and sing in choruses when solos are healthier and your own freedoms might infringe on the health and lives of others?

Say “freedom” once, twice, and the third time “Me and Bobby Maggee” rung in my ears. And freedom shrunk to a nostalgic hunger for something gone…

Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose

Nothin', that's all that Bobby left me, yeah

But, feelin' good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues

Hey, feelin' good was good enough for me, mm-hmm

Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee

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62. The Young

 Day 12 of quarantine

I talked on the phone with grandson Trey yesterday. His symptoms are gone, my quarantine is almost over, and we are making plans for a steak dinner on Monday night. 

 

The phone call was troubled. Trey’s 20, and, according to him, his cohort—classmates from his aborted first year of college—is not taking Covid-19 seriously, not concerned that the disease has anything to do with them—even when they are infected! I told him that there were 23 new cases in Union County one recent day, and wondered whether any of his classmates were among them. He didn’t know, but maybe.

 

We middle-aged and older Americans concerned about the strength and impact of this pandemic don’t talk much about the young. We wonder why our contemporaries continue to refuse masks, march in parades and go into or tend stores without them. We argue with preachers who demand full churches and wedding planners who want big crowds, and we laud the Navajo who are taking care of their elders and the health care professionals everywhere risking their lives to make the rest of us safe.  

 

We worry about the “economy” and parents struggling with online classes, but I hear little about the 15-20 year olds condemned to them. They should be traveling the world and trying things out; we’re asking them to stay home, go to high school and college online, and find work as grocery shelf stockers, gas station attendants, or Amazon warehouse workhorses. 

 

When the young do get sick, it’s no big deal. Young and healthy, the Covid slips by them with a few days of no smell and no appetite, and then is gone. They’re cavalier; we don’t give them a thought.

 

Seems to me a perfect opportunity to give them work with purpose, to enlist the young in actively fighting Covid-19 and addressing conditions that promote it. They could work drive-through test sites, haul water on a reservation. Instead of pizzas, they could deliver meals on wheels, groceries and mail to the frightened and shut-ins in their own communities. Or help in classrooms to spread elementary students into smaller pods.

 

We could ask them what they’d like to do to make the world they’re about to inherit better. We should at least be talking to them. 

 

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58. Driving on the right side

Day 8 of my quarantine.

 

There are laws—and there are laws. We might quibble about speed limits—does Montana still do without them in its wide-open spaces?—but we don’t contest the law that says we drive on the right side of the road. We also generally obey stop signs and traffic lights, use our turn signals, drive sober, and make sure we have two headlights and that the stoplights work. We don’t want a ticket, but if we get one, nine times out of ten we admit we were in the wrong—that we’d broken the law—and we pay our fines. And even when we contest, I don’t hear anyone saying there should be no traffic laws at all.

 

We also read the signs in public and business restrooms with some comfort; “wash your hands; llave sus manos,” they say, and sometimes threaten to fire an employee caught disobeying. Most of us appreciate eating in clean places being run by people who wash their hands. And if we do get sick after eating at a restaurant we’re likely to file a complaint with the owner or manager. Or we drop it and don’t eat there anymore. And hope they go broke. We don’t question the need for food-handler laws.

 

We might bristle at some clean air and water laws, but my guess is that most of us have sympathy for the families with young children suffering because there was lead in their water. We assume that water comes out of our tap clean and fit to drink, and in this modern world, with a million chemicals that can threaten our health, we’ll trade our mayor’s freedom to set local rules for a more stringent authority. 

 

There are all kinds of laws that are “rules of the road,” that make our lives safer and easier. Not following these laws might make us feel powerful in the moment, like a drunk teenager roaring down the wrong side of a seemingly empty freeway in the middle of the night might feel—or it might kill us. 

 

Wearing a facemask is that kind of law. Not being able to fill the church or belly up to the bar in a pandemic is that kind of law. It’s about your health and mine. Let’s all stay in the right lane and use our turn signals.

 

# # # 

56. Facemasks

A morning editorial in the Washington Post reminds us that “geometric progression,” will put daily Covid-19 cases over 400,000 by Inauguration Day. Even with rapidly improving medical responses, our death count will grow to 1918 Influenza numbers, and our health care system will be severely stretched. 

As many of you know, I spent three hours in a car with my grandson on Sunday, and he tested positive on Monday. My friends rallied around, and I am hunkered down in a cabin at the head of Wallowa Lake. This place, which bustles with summer homes and visitors from across the world in July, is silent now. There are no cars, trucks, mowers, snow-blowers, or laughing children. I’ve not heard a dog bark; the deer are silent browsers on plants that stick out above a foot of snow. 

 

My two grandsons are quarantined at my house in Joseph. Trey seems to be doing fine, although he scared me with a call about not feeling well yesterday. He later said that food and drink helped. He’s healthy, and strong as the proverbial ox. I believe he has Covid—or had it, and that he is young and fit enough to get through it. For me at 78, it is more problematic. I study the virus and its implications.

 

According to the Post editorial:

 

“Multiple epidemiological studies have shown that gatherings of more than 10 persons, close contact in confined spaces, prolonged contact and contact without face masks pose the highest risk.”

 

The editors bypass the Trump administration, suggesting that President-elect Biden use bully pulpit to engage state and local governments and the public, nation-wide, in efforts to stop the geometric advance of the disease. In regions where case counts top 20 per 100,000 per day, they would:  

 

“1) restrict all indoor gatherings of adults to no more than 10 people; 

“2) close indoor restaurants, bars and clubs; and 

“3) mandate universal mask-wearing in public.

 

It’s now day 4 for me since exposure. Trey and I both wore facemasks during our three-hour car ride. We also wore masks in the house as we unpacked, made and ate dinner, and settled down Sunday night. And again Monday morning through breakfast and our car trip to testing. 

 

I know my quarantine is 14 days, but each day I feel good gives me more confidence, and makes me thankful for that sometimes inconvenient use of facemasks.