Social Distance Diary: Remembering your first (quarantine)

Your humble narrator (L)  age almost 3. 

This is one of the few digitally archived photos available that prove I ever had a childhood. There are others, but this, like those, is a picture of a picture... which means someone, probably not me, either scanned in or took a picture of the original with their phone.  It's an especially telling picture; one that explains not only a lot about me, but about some of the dynamics that helped forge most of my childhood. You'll notice that it's a birthday party. My brother's actually. And that's me, wanting my piece of the spotlight like only an almost 3 year old can.  (Sorry, Brian.) That's me, on the left and my older brother on the right. We're sitting on our dad's lap. He was still fixing airplanes at Lunken Airport, where Proctor & Gamble executives used to fly in and out on their corporate jets.

Wasn't I a cute little duffer? I always thought so. It was quite the shock to my system when I learned that not everyone thought so. Of course, one of the reasons that maybe a pitiful few didn't like me was because it took a while for me to get socialized to the point that I realized I wasn't the center of the friggin' universe.

If you're paying attention to the picture, you might notice that I look on the pale side. I'd been sick when the picture was taken.  I was sick a lot.  A cold/ flu that never seemed to end, that kept me (and my parents) awake at night; hacking coughs, trouble breathing, a come and go high temperature.  Doctor after doctor misdiagnosing it. At one point they took out my tonsils just in case that was the problem. (It wasn't.)  I wasn't breathing well, but it never occurred to me that I was sick because no one TOLD me I was sick and I hadn't been around other kids enough to know that not everyone was experiencing life the way I was. 

By the time I was 5, I'd been sick for most of my life.  I almost didn't get into kindergarten on time because I was small for my age.  I was in Kindergarten when I was finally diagnosed correctly, and was sick so much of the academic year that I was nearly held back because of how much I missed. (I was ultimately allowed to make up everything and went on to 1st grade, which just goes to show that kindergarten teachers have infinitely more faith than say, grad school administrators who insist on making me finish late when the delay wasn't my fault but I was well able to catch up. But that's another story.) 

The diagnosis: chronic asthma, made worse by allergies. These words are far more common now, as are the treatments. But in the late 1970's chronic asthma was considered rare. I was pretty much allergic to the entire outside world. I was started on an aggressive treatment of allergy shots, daily inhaler use, and some other medicines.  I was sent to camps and workshops to learn breathing techniques and strategies that were designed to maybe reduce the amount of medicine I was taking. (It worked.)

My parents were also told to limit my exposure to dust and pollen as much as possible. They pulled the carpet out of my bedroom. I had to give up my stuffed animals. My mom mopped my room, floor to ceiling, every single day. If anyone in a 5 yard radius was mowing in the summer, I wasn't allowed outside. And since we had a next door neighbor who couldn't help but mow his grass, whether it needed it or not, I was always inside. 

Always. 

When I was 8, the doctors finally gave my parents the green light to let me outside other than school or church.  I had a lot to catch up on, and mostly I didn't. I've never been great at sports; years of having to stay inside and inactive made it that much harder for me to pick up everything from swimming to riding my bicycle. I didn't know it then, but I had picked up a Fear of the World. After all, it was trying to kill me, right?

It took me a long time to figure out that I'd developed not so much a fear of dying as much as a fear of living. I knew it what it felt like to almost die. Seriously.  The body's panic center goes into hyper drive when, for example, you're unable to breathe, and working harder at it only makes it worse. A full blown asthma attack feels like drowning on the absence of air. 

I've been thinking about that time a lot over the last almost three months. I returned from San Antonio on in early March and I've been under some kind of social distancing/quarantine regiment ever since. Not because I was told to, or because I'm sick, other than the garden variety Ohio Valley Funk that nearly everyone living in Louisville gets in the Spring. But because it's been the right thing to do.  I was accused early on of not taking it seriously when I voiced concerns that mass shut downs without a plan in place was a form of economic warfare. I have been accused of being manipulated by one grand conspiracy or another because I wear a mask when I go out and I support social distancing as a way to reduce the spread of COVID-19. 

The economic warfare has gone on anyway, just in macro. The grifters in charge of the country have used the stimulus bills to rob the country blind while throwing pennies at some of the rest of us.   

But I come back to this picture. Not because I was a cute little duffer, or because it's a good picture. But because at this point, I hadn't learned to be afraid of life yet.  And it does make me wonder, what will come out of the pandemic. What will we learn? Will we learn? I'm not enough of an optimist to believe that this apocalypse, like the others before, will be the grand turning point. This isn't even my first apocalypse; and if you're reading, it's not yours either.  Even if you're too young to remember 9/11, it was an apocalypse that has impacted us for the worse. So learn some breathing exercises. Adopt some strategies... ones that keep you calm. We may be "re-opening" whatever the hell that means, but this apocalypse is far from done. And it won't be the last one. 

Social Distance Diary: transmitting the dharma

Today is one of those days when I feel the world shrinking, when the the mountain range of things I can't control (always there in distance, like the Rocky Mountains) just laughs at me and my approaching level of incompetence. 

I think of myself as a river pebble. Sometimes I get knocked around by the current. Sometimes I bump up against other pebbles, bigger rocks, a fish, a cricket, a tadpole, or a plant. Sometimes the current lodges me somewhere: I get stuck in the mud, or between a couple of other pieces of detached sediment.  But water is as caustic as it is refreshing. And the current is always in flux. Being, as I am, a river pebble, I pick things up as I go. But I continue to struggle against what wasn't passed on to me to begin with. 

I really like the house my wife and I live in. It's an old house, and has old house problems. A good many of those problem are things I'm able to fix. Most simple repairs, for example. I've changed power outlets, hung shelves, patched and painted walls.   Replaced toilet seats.  These are things I've picked up over the years: like changing a tire, a battery, or the oil. I know a little about a lot of things, actually, which makes me at least moderately useful maybe 80% of the time. 

But the things I do know stand in relief against all that I don't.  And while I try not to dwell on the reasons why, since the slim difference between a reason and an excuse is a dollop of self-pity,  the fact is it's difficult not to track it back.  

My grandfather, my mother's dad, was a carpenter. He smelled of saw dust, coffee, and nicotine.  He used to scribble little projects on scraps of paper, pieces of paper towel. I used to sneak into his workshop just to smell the smells. My old man ran a jet repair crew in the Air Force; he knew how to work with his hands.  There was a wealth of knowledge there that wasn't passed on. I don't know if any of it would have interested me, but I wasn't given the chance to reject it, either. I was a sickly kid and protecting me meant keeping me away from certain things. 

The things I HAVE learned, I sought. And I do think there's something to be said for being the active seeker of knowledge.  But there's something else about the heritage of knowledge.   I've had a lot of teachers over the years, but it's difficult to trace what I know down to a single heritage.  

In the Chinese tradition of Zen, heritage matters. It's how teachers become teachers; the monastic certificate program.  The master discovers who the next in line is and, through a ceremony , the dharma is transmitted and a new master in invested. And depending on what school you look at, the issue of heritage matters.   Heritage gets a bad wrap in America because it's been all wrapped up in nationalism and narrow views of patriotism.  Heritage and tradition have become tropes, and our culture chases them like they matter.  Whether it's being a Harvard Legacy, a third generation Teamster, a fourth generation military volunteer, or a trust fund baby, we chase heritage like it matters more than the life right in front of us. 

Maybe it's because we're a country of mutts. Those inbred Aryans -- the Proud Boy incel types who think blood heritage matters at the expense of common sense and history -- chase heritage like merchant social climbers Jane Austen is still read for writing about.  Our need for a royalty formed out an imaginary meritocracy makes us chase celebrities and social media "influencers." Maybe we do this because we're more than a dozen generations past the place where most Americans  can easily trace where they come from and we're stuck with 23 and Me.

The good thing is I'm still not scared to learn.  And that's a kind of dharma, too.

Social Distance Diary: Gimped

I can't complain. 

It'd be easy to. But complaining might jinx it and if I'm being honest, a twisted ankle isn't the worst thing that can happen during the plague year.  

And now with talk of "reopening the economy"... as if the economy has really closed... the only thing I seem to be able to focus on is what to carry forward. 

I keep thinking of my maternal grandmother, Lonnabelle Dunn, and what she carried. She lived through the Great Depression. She saved lidded plastic containers -- the kind that cottage cheese, sour cream, and margarine were packaged in. She washed them and saved them "just in case." She grew up in Crystal Lake, Wisconsin.  She taught me to play Gin Rummy, which she enjoyed because her father, a deeply religious man of an temperance bent, wouldn't let her play any card games that used face cards since face cards were used in gambling.  She would save barely used sheets of paper towel.  She could, in turns, be pragmatic and then  pollyanna.  Her world had clearly defined roles and expectations and she spent her later years watching all of that unravel. It must have seemed unfair. 

Some frugality was already set before all of this mess with COVID-19.  It's not that I'm especially good with money ... it tends to burn a hole in my pocket ... but I've been pretty good over the years at keeping reasonable, shelf stable supplies.  I've learned to be a decent cook. I'm fortunate to be married to someone who is an amazing cook. We're decent planners and not particularly scared of new things. I'm content to carry that forward, along with a renewed conviction that life is suffering and connections matter, and that people are still more important than profit.

The thing I don't want to carry forward is some expectation of normalcy. Normal is an unfortunate nostalgia. People infected with it simultaneously have a very specific, concrete notion of what it looks like but can't really seem to agree on what it means. We group together based on having similar pictures of normal in our minds.  We pass these cement abstractions on to out children, and within two generations normal becomes tradition, which is sacrosanct... until it isn't. 

A year after the 1918 flu, the Rev. Francis E. Tourscher was concerned that people were starting to forget, which is why he recorded the stories of nurses in Philadelphia for preservation in the Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia . He wanted the facts on record from people who experienced the pandemic because memory has a way of giving way to nostalgia. 

I both derive some comfort and am deeply horrified that our tendency to embrace nostalgia isn't tied to something as new to the world as technology.

Normal -- that infective kind of nostalgia -- often ends up running contrary to fact. And in these, the days of Trumplandia, where facts are under erasure more than ever, normal is a nostalgia we can't afford if we're to carry anything forward that will keep us alive.  So I'm going to let my ankle heal. I will need it to carry things forward. Things that matter.

Social Distance Diary: Check-in checklist

Yes. There's what you'd call a typo.

It's not the social distancing that bothers me, or staying home. I've worked from home for several years now, and though I miss being able to haunt my favorite coffee shops and miss seeing some friends in person, I actually feel like I'm doing ok. I was seriously under-employed to the point of not really working before the outbreak; and I don't mind poverty, exactly. I wish there was more money around for emergencies but thanks to a few thoughtful supporters, I've been able to help us eek out a few solutions on the home front. Which is to say, feel free to check out the tabs about being a Patron or offering one time support via Venmo or Cash.me... 

...but these are tough times, tougher than many have had to experience. Not everyone does poverty well, and I have to confess it's something I've learned on my own over the past couple of decades rather than something I was raised with. My parents worked hard and we lived what used to be called a more or less middle class lifestyle; but my attempts... mostly feeble, always well-intended, but ultimately doomed to failure... have always been short. So if you can't toss some money in the hat, believe me, I get it. There's a few projects I'd love to support but I don't have money and I can't put in sweat equity right now. 

But that's not to say I don't keep busy. I do. 

I count things. A lot. Being a list maker of long repute, I am one who likes ticking off boxes. This what serves as routine for me, I suppose. I have a daily practice -- my writing, reading, and spiritual practice is all tied together. I make coffee. I've been doing more cooking lately, and have only really had one catastrophe. (It involved burned oatmeal.) My podcast takes up a significant amount of time... not only the writing and recording (which is honestly the easy part) but the networking and trying to grow it. I'm fully engaged in my creative work... but this was a pre-COVID state, so, like being under-employed. 

That's not to say I'm not noticing some issues. It's difficult for me to focus on long writing tasks, for example, so even if I had paying clients right now, I'm certain it would move like sludge.  I'm forgetting what is (for me) fairly simple language. ( I couldn't remember the word "superfluous" a few days ago.)  

And I thought my email was hacked 

when in reality I changed the password 

and then promptly FORGOT what it was.

As an alcoholic working on just a little over 2 years of sobriety (infant!) I have had to come to terms with the fact that my brain sometimes works against me. It's not a fault in the programming. It's not crossed wires. I'm allergic to booze like I'm allergic to pollen. That's how the ol' electric thinking box was built. But unlike pollen, which immediately creates a negative reaction, I LIKE what booze does to me. At first, anyway. It is, in a way, an intellectual and even spiritual lubricant. There was a reason why Li Po would write 100 poems for every gallon of wine. Believe me,  I get it.

But my brain makes it near impossible for me to stop once I've gotten started. I chase that feeling... but like anything ephemeral, that dragon is impossible to chase. 

So I make lists. I tick boxes. I am getting better at living in the moment because... well ... anything else is not being present. And if I've learned anything over the years, it is that being present matter more the amount of money I make, more than any socially constructed abstraction of my success or my failure. 

My wife, who is a far better human than I am, said it like this: "What we have works for us."

One of my readings, today, though, did, at least, make me feel better about my need to make lists. Early in  Run to the Mountains, the first volume of Thomas Merton's journals, he made lists. These journals were written before he went to Gethsemani, when he was still a student. A

among the lists he made, one was of things he couldn't believe existed. Two items on this list stand out:

The New Belgium Fascist Party

Evanston, IL

Tom, I get it. I don't understand fascists, either. I've been to Evanston, Illinois and know for certain it exists. But I can't say the same about Coalinga Junction, California. And I've been there, too. 

Social Distance Diary: A Walk in the Park

This near hollow tree is still standing. I take a lot of comfort from that.

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. - Herman Hesse

We went on a walk in Iroquois Park last weekend, along the horse trail a bit. Just to get some air. Just to get a little daylight together.  We picked the horse trail because there were fewer people there; not that there were a lot of people, because there weren't. But with the outbreak and my wife's work, we're being super diligent about social distancing and have been... even before Andy asked us to.

I love being out in nature, and I count it among my blessings to live where I have access to a park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. He, like John Muir, had an inkling of humanity's relationship with nature, and of our need for it.  More people know that Olmsted helped design Central Park in New York than know he designed "The Big Three" parks in Louisville.  At the core of his design philosophy was an idea that may have come to him when he was traveling in secret across the Pre-Civil War south and writing the articles that would eventually become The Cotton Kingdom: that it nature should be left to be nature because that's how it best serves people. (Never let it be thought that he was some prescient eco-warrior, because he wasn't.) He was very much opposed to manicured landscapes that were very much in vogue... a manicured look that was meant to suggest mankind's dominance over nature.  

Iroquois Park was originally designed with this in mind; and even though some very unOlmsted-like things have been added over the years, the amphitheater is a boon to the south end and to the city, the playground is well maintained, and while I'm terrible at basketball, I don't begrudge anyone a pick-up game in non-outbreak conditions. A large part of the park is still maintained much like Olmsted imagined it. Fallen trees are allowed to rot where they fall as long as trails aren't blocked. During our walk, I noticed where a tree that had fallen across the horse trail was simply cut in the place that blocked the way but left on both sides.

As humans -- as monkey not long from the trees -- we sometimes can't help ourselves but to leave a mark. Amanda asked me on our walk if I ever carved my initials into a tree. No, I told her. I always felt bad for the tree.

This expression of hypersensitivity didn't surprise her; she knows me too well.  She pointed out, though, that as long as the carving doesn't go all the way around the circumference of the truck, that it will simply grow and expand with the tree.

She wasn't asking because she wanted to carve our initials into some poor tree; but she did notice I was taking pictures of some carvings that attracted my attention:

While I can't bring myself to make such marks, I do appreciate that the tree carries on in spite of it for the most part. I suppose if I felt like I had permission to carve into a tree, I'd consider it. But I'm not one that the trees have decided to talk to. Not yet, at any rate.

I was talking to an old friend recently who takes stunning photographs of far flung places. He told me  that a person gets some perspective when he stubs his toe on a 5000 year old tree. This tree may not be that old, and I (surprisingly) didn't tub my toe on it. But I derive a great deal of comfort from it, and the others being there. 

Social Distance Diary: cat food

You can't tell he chonky. But take my word for it. He's a tick with fur.

It's not the run on toilet paper and hand sanitzer that surprises me. It's that it's still (at this writing) still possible to find Twinkies (including CHOCOLATE FLAVORED ONES, thank you very much ironic junk food gods that put these on Earth AFTER I gave up sweets for good) and Doritos... even the  questionable favors (anything but nacho cheese)... are still on the shelves.

We are not prone to panic; my wife's work in a mens' homeless shelter pretty much assures that if COVID-19 hits the homeless community that we're front and center for exposure. And... it will. That is, if it hasn't hit already but no one knows because the state of Kentucky has 120 test kits... that's one for every county for you Social Studies folks. Add to the the fact that the executive management of #Trumplandia is blocking states from using Medicaid to pay for testing. I'm sure they'll call this a cost savings issue, and Mitch McConnell will flap his throad waddle in passionate agreement, even he flops his eyes back agreeing with the trillion dollar drain on the Fed to bolster up the corporate cronies in the military-industrial complex. But again ... not prone to panic.  We are planners and preppers (of a sort) by natural inclination, so we're more or less ready if River City experiences a serious lockdown.

So we plan, avoid panic, and accept that while we will do everything we can to avoid exposure, the fact is, our chances are better than average. 

But we DID notice yesterday that we were low on cat food for our chonky little trash kitty, Wasabi. And we noticed that we were dangerously low on cheese. And honestly, I figured that, being Thursday, the next wave of panic shopping wouldn't hit until today (Friday) when most everyone gets paid. So we went to the store last night after a lovely dinner with her mom and some friends we see maybe once or twice a year.

Dear Friends and Readers, I was wrong.

The Kroger on New Cut only had two check out lanes open, and pretty much everyone but us was pushing around carts that were loaded down and roughly 100 times their individual body weight.  Of course, there were tons of Self-checkout Lanes available, but I personally don't like encouraging wage theft and no one pushing around 1000 metric ton of groceries is going to scan all that themselves. 

We used a small cart and bought cat food (double coupon!),  yogurt, cheese, a few incidentals for upcoming meal planning, and some seltzer water.  And then we waited. The three carts ahead of us were loaded down with apoclapyse supplies: frozen pizzas, chicken nuggets, sugar cerea, milk, pop. No one had toilet paper or hand sanitizer because the shelves were empty from the previous wave.  The cashier's eyes were glazed over and there weren't enough people working for either register to have its own bagger... which mean the cashiers had to do double duty.

But, we survived and made it home in time to go to bed. And we we woke up in plenty of time this morning. 

I'm not hearing anything about mass riots over bungholio paper, but I have heard that bidet sales are doing well.  I suppose there's that. And to be honest, when all this is over, I can't say that I won't think hard about buying one for The Hermitage.