The New Normal
The New Normal
First, a disclaimer. I know compared to many others, I am very fortunate. I am retired. I can stay inside and try to insulate myself from the Corona virus without too much disruption of my life. I have not suddenly found myself unemployed, through no fault of my own, with children to raise and now to tutor, worrying over how to pay my bills. This pandemic is not funny. Of all the quotes I have come across in my seventy plus years, the one that seemingly always applies is by Horace Walpole. “To the people who think, the world is comic. To the people who feel, the world is tragic.”
There is a great deal of feeling out there, an enormous amount of pain and suffering, and I am not immune to that. But, to help retain my sanity, I can think about my own situation which is the substance of this blog.
After three months of getting up, having breakfast, checking email, reading my book, eating lunch, reading my book, watching World War II documentaries, taking a nap, eating dinner, watching Netflix/Amazon/Hulu/, going to bed, I lose track of the days. In a Seinfeld episode, Kramer asks George if he has any reason to get up in the morning. George’s reply, “I like to read the Daily News.” I look forward to completing the Daily Jumble with Polley.
I pick up the newspaper in the morning and sift out the sports section which is two pages long and takes thirty seconds to read. It features articles about toad jumping contests in Bolivia, vine swinging competition in Angola, scorpion races in Costa Rica, and backyard swing set challenges which are judged by speed of swinging and height, and editorials about why there are no articles about baseball, football, basketball, etc.
As I grew older, I got more face to shave and less hair to cut. But now that barber shops are off limits I am worried about going for the Einstein look. .I stopped shaving. Why scrape my face with a sharp device? I shaved every day for over sixty years, and it was time to try something different. But then growing a beard is not simply a matter of developing a laissez-faire attitude toward the hirsutism of your face. You have to trim the beard, and it is harder to see under one’s neck than you might imagine. So now every morning I try to shape the mass of white stringy stuff plastered on my face to make it look more like that of a Roman with a British accent in a bible movie of the fifties than a barnacled tugboat listing to port. It keeps me busy.
My wardrobe has shrunk dramatically. I basically have two outfits. The first is what I wear about ninety-five percent of the time, a cross between pajamas and sweatpants with a shirt boasting a slogan advertising some vacation spot…:Lake Placid…Winter Olympics….and a sweatshirt identifying a college connection. Villanova, 2018 Champions. The other apparel is my Zoom outfit consisting of a clean sport shirt. Pants are irrelevant. When the pandemic is finally over, I will find my pair of shoes.
There are days where our confinement does not seem so bad. Can’t go to my barber shop so I don’t have to make a crucial decision on where the electric hair trimmer my barber uses is set to # 1 or #2. Can’t go to the grocery store, so I do not have to decide whether to choose the rice pilaf with garlic and cheese or the rice pilaf with mushroom and scallion. Can’t go to the fast food restaurant so I don’t have to choose among the bacon burger, jalapeno burger, cajun burger, or the western buffalo burger. Can’t go to hardware store so I don’t have to decide on whether to fix the weather stripping on the front door or the dented gutters. Not having to make decisions can be very relaxing.
There are other days when I wish I had more decisions to make, days when my eyes are weakened from reading, and I feel like I am in a prison cell block, solitary confinement, just me and the tv, only three channels and two of them are online shopping shows and the third is a tv evangelist preacher. Of course, with cable I have six thousand channels but still it appears my best option at times is to train myself to become interested in documentaries about sheep herding in Outer Mongolia or searching for Attila the Hun’s burial site, or studying the mating habits of the dung beetle in Egypt. My fall back choice is re-watching episodes of Law and Order—the episodes with Lennie Briscoe.
The New Normal involves shifts in time. Since the days all seem to be the same, I feel like an aspiring passenger standing on the subway platform watching the train cars, each car a day, zip by without my ever boarding the train. Weeks fly by without any distinctive days in recent memory. Where is the train going?
And then there are days when it seems the train has stopped, doors not opening, and it appears that the pandemic ride will never be over. There is no destination…no meaning. Why is the train not moving? Time becomes slower than my breathing when asleep.
The New Normal changes health care. Zoom appointments with doctors are just a little strange.
“Hello, Doctor.”
“Hello, Mr. Maltese. How are you?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“I see. Well, how are
you feeling?”
“Fine, I guess. How do I look?”
“There is not too much I can tell, especially since your webcam is turned off.”
“Oh, sorry.”
Some time in early June, we decided to brave the elements and venture forth to the hotbed of potential danger, the supermarket. I was a polar bear emerging from a fully conscious, self-imposed hibernation, trying to shake the winter’s worth of sleep induced by binge watching television. In the car my glasses fogged from the mask wrapped around my nose and mouth, and my Darth Vader breathing drowned out the radio.
As we parked the car in the supermarket lot, I looked at all the masked people, all these Lone Rangers, extras from a fifties western, pushing carts back and forth. Each one of them was a potential danger, and I was a potential danger to each one of them. How did we get to this point that every one of us is a threat…to each other?
For the first time in a while we have to make choices, though some choices like the arrows on the aisle floors are made for us. Our gloved hands pluck boxes of Grape Nuts, Rice Pilaf with Mushrooms and Scallions, Cheez-its from the shelves. The cart loads up fast. I can barely make out the words of the masked cashier behind the plexiglass, but she seems nice and she seems careful. She is a threat as well, and I am certain she sees us the same way.
The New Normal involves unloading the car when we get home, washing our hands, changing our clothes and wiping down all the items we have just purchased. The food we just bought to sustain our lives can also be a potential threat to those lives. Funny, isn’t it?
Blanche DuBois, the protagonist in A Streetcar Named Desire, lounges in a chair and muses, “Don’t you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour—but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands—and who knows what to do with it?”
For me the trappings of the pandemic have created this irony of unplanned time. I have this droplet of eternity, a moment when I can do whatever I want to do, to complete promised but unfinished chores, to read something I have put off reading, to revisit the past via letters and old fading photographs, to write the book I have always wanted to write. Here is opportunity. But the sameness of the days injects a kind of inertia in my thinking, not wanting to do really anything. The whole feeling makes the concept of heaven less attractive.
This is a larger lesson here, a lesson that repeats itself in almost every age in every culture….in art, in literature, in music, in history. It is a lesson that reminds us of our place in the universe. Whenever we think we are hot stuff, masters of our fate, commanders of our ships of destiny, nature flicks our ears and reminds us of our fragility. Perhaps if we internalized this lesson, if we understood the fragility and promise of those around us, we would be kinder to each other.
