Meme Monday – Back to Lockdown

I posted this meme on Facebook last year after reading Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, which is a great novel that I really enjoyed, about an 85 year old woman meandering her way to a party in New York on New Year’s Eve, 1984. Ms. Boxfish was a very talented ad woman for Macy’s in the 1930s, and the character is based on the real-life ad woman, Margaret Fishback.

Facebook likes to remind you of things you posted on this day in history, so this popped up, and I decided it’s a meme, and it sums up the whole feel of Shelter in Place (SIP) so perfectly.

Speaking of Shelter in Place, we’re back in it, though not as strictly as we were in March. Then, stores had to close entirely, whereas now, they have to reduce customers to 20% of capacity. This is frustrating, because it means lines in front of all of the stores while people wait to get in, but it will be safer to have more people outside wearing their masks and standing 6ft apart, rather than congregating inside. Back in March, restaurants were limited to Take Out only. Then they allowed outdoor dining, and restauranteurs invested a lot of money and effort in setting up for that, with heat lamps and taking over parts of streets, and barricades to protect diners from cars, etc. Then they allowed limited indoor seating. As the virus took off again, they shut down indoor dining, and now they’ve shut down outdoor dining until early January at least. Sigh. Not that it will affect me much, I wasn’t eating in restaurants, even outdoors, wasn’t comfortable with that. Too many people without masks. But here we are.

Also discouraged (Forbidden? Not sure.) is getting together with people outside of your household, even small numbers, even outside. We had already decided not to have a repeat of Thanksgiving, even though that was only 6 of us and we tried our best to be safe, wore masks, etc. With numbers surging, we decided the risk wasn’t worth it. So Christmas will be just the 3 of us (+ Mulder!), which will be cozy and different and fine, but it will be sad to not see family.

I have a friend, a very good friend, with whom I do not agree politically. She is much more conservative than I, and lives in an area of California that is more conservative than here. Her husband works in surgical instruments sales or some such, and thus comes into contact with a lot of medical professionals, though not infectious disease experts or Emergency Room physicians. So when we would text about wearing masks and so on, she would send information about how wearing masks for too long was dangerous due to inhaling your own CO2 or whatever. I asked her, what about doctors and nurses who wear them in long surgeries, and she said, ‘well, a doctor sent us this information, so I don’t know’. I’m never sure what to say to that, so I just let it go. She would try to get me to come out to dinner, for her birthday in August, or for my birthday later this month. I said I would be happy to have takeout in my back yard, or her back yard, but was not comfortable going to restaurants. She said she and her husband were dining indoors and they felt safe doing so. I made a mental note to not see her again until we are vaccinated.

Not too surprisingly, she and her family came down with COVID right before Thanksgiving. Perhaps she got it at a restaurant, perhaps not. Her son works at a Tesla factory, and her husband works selling medical equipment, and I suspect they did not take the disease too seriously. She told me that she felt duped by those who told her it was no worse than a cold or a flu, that she resented that it was politicized the way it was. To which I say, AMEN, I resent both of those things as well. Thankfully, her family is all OK at this point. Her husband had to go to the E.R. 3x for breathing treatments. Her older son spent a couple of days in the ICU, and she and her husband were horrified by the x-rays of his lungs. He suffers from severe epilepsy which has left him mentally about 1, though he is 31 now, and non verbal, so it was very scary for them all.

We are going into a dark winter, one that will in many ways be “gray and short of fizz”. We will continue to enjoy the stupidly gorgeous weather here (70 degrees tomorrow, no rain in sight, hoping for some serious storms this winter) with long walks and maybe driving around a bit. We put up our Christmas tree yesterday. There will be no ‘baking day’ this year, which is personally tragic, but I will make some fudge and candied nuts to send to family and friends.

Stout hearts, friends. We will get through this.