Here, lightly edited, is a representative sample of my thoughts and comments on social media from the second week of our new reality, starting Wednesday, March 18 (if you haven’t read Week 1 yet, that’s here). . . .
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18
10:27 a.m. — Another odd facet of this new, strange time is how much sunshine we’ve been enjoying while mostly shut in. Curious about rainfall in Portland this year, I did a little digging. Rain gauges maintained by the city’s Bureau of Environmental gathered between just under 19 inches to nearly 22-and-a-half at various locations around the city this rain year (since Oct. 1).
The total in an average year runs between 37 and 42 inches — at least, that’s what I’ve been telling my Portland Walking Tour guests for the past few years. Last year was a dry one; it saw only 30.62 inches.
Although Portland received an unusually high amount of rain this January of 7.39 inches (a full one-third of our total!), we’ve gotten less than an inch and a half in March, and zero for the past three days.
Through the rest of the year, the mean falls, month by month, from above 2.5 inches in April to half an inch in July before starting to climb upward again for the final month of the annual rain year: about 1.8 inches in September.
A crude graph on ClimateStations.com of annual precipitation on a July-through-June annual cycle shows we had record rainfalls in 2016 and 2017 (especially the latter: more than 50 inches!), but dry years more recently: looks like about 30.5 in 2018 and 27 in 2019.
So although I wasn’t able to find the precise figures I sought for direct comparisons from month to month and year to year, it does appear that we’re experiencing another particularly dry year.
3:30 p.m. — It is now a week since I performed in what I could not have known at the time were the final two shows of “The Journal of Ben Uchida,” which completed 21 performances of a scheduled 41-show run.
Within the next 24 hours, our world began its massive shift, utterly and forever. That evening, a Utah Jazz player tested positive for coronavirus and the NBA immediately shut down the rest of its season — the first substantial national domino that became an avalanche the following day.
On my blog, “American Currents,” I look back over the week and assess the current situation, first in terms of my own life. . . .
Multnomah County Library is closed until further notice, of course . . . but aside from assuring us late fines have been suspended and books we have requested for reserve will be held for us, the library also has instructed patrons NOT to return any materials — because there’s no one there to process them back into the collection.
However, I’ll bet there are enough folks out there who do not read directions, such that the book return depot behind Central Branch may be stuffed to the gills by now. [This is a photo of the stack as it stood yesterday, March 26.]
THURSDAY, MARCH 19
12:09 p.m. — What with “coronavirus updates” coming in via email from everyone from the Oregon Symphony to my apartment management, credit union, and hairdresser, I’m having a more difficult time trying to keep my email box clear and up to date than when I was working.
1:37 p.m. — We did not panic.
We did not stockpile.
We went to the Farmers Market on Saturday, and on Friday and Monday I made brief trips to Whole Foods and Safeway for some essentials (NOT TP; we have plenty of that still).
On Tuesday noon I dropped a package at the post office and bought stamps (no line!), and that evening I bought a couple of crowlers of beer from our friendly neighborhood taproom, The Growler Guys, which had hosted my birthday party last year and could definitely use our support.
I think we have enough food to hold out another three or four days without having to scrounge, if necessary.
However, several of the regional chains decided yesterday to open an hour early every morning for shoppers from the “vulnerable” population only; that is, 60 years and older. Carole is well into that demographic and I crossed the line last year. So we could go together, or I could go alone.
The gamble becomes: Would it be better to risk infection in public now (that is, tomorrow morning), or delay until absolutely necessary to restock our home, when the rules may have changed again and no one can tell whether supply lines will hold up?
The gamble becomes: Would it be better to risk infection in public now (that is, tomorrow morning), or delay until absolutely necessary to restock our home, when the rules may have changed again and no one can tell whether supply lines will hold up?
FRIDAY, MARCH 20
9:41 a.m. — I decided to take advantage of the hour-early “oldsters” opening at Whole Foods in the Pearl between 8:15 and 8:45.
For eight stops coming up from South Waterfront, there was no one else on the streetcar but me and the operator in his locked cabin. Finally a pair of elderly Asians boarded at SW 10th and Clay. One sat up front, the other in the center of the train, and I was standing at the far rear, where I could watch everything, so there was more than 30 feet between each of us.
Since the professional hair dye job I got to play a 40-year-old in “The Journal of Ben Uchida” is still mostly in place, I took along my passport as well as my driver’s license for proof of age. The security guard ever-so-politely turned away a young woman who came in the door of Whole Foods at the same time as I did. I took my time in front of the guard to get my shopping cart, put on the latex gloves I had brought with me, and pull out the shopping list Carole had drawn up . . . but he didn’t challenge me.
Back on the street, I’d never seen fewer customers than baristas in the spacious Starbucks at NW 11th and Couch. (I didn’t go in; just perceived this through the window from the trolley platform across the street. That Starbucks closed permanently a day or two later.) Also, I’d never seen that intersection with fewer than six pedestrians and almost no cars in sight.
Powell’s Books on the opposite corner was closed and empty, as had been Case Study Coffee behind the Central Library streetcar platform on my way in.
I wanted to feel scared, but didn’t know how.
There was only an amorphous but persistent apprehension.
11:26 a.m. — One thing that lifts my heart.
It’s nesting season, so we’ve been seeing a lot of red-breasted finches (descriptive terms only here, not species-specific; I’m not a birder) perching on our balcony wires.
And the hummingbirds have been VERY active around our feeder in the morning and at dusk. We see them out the window from our dinner table as we dine.
Pixie says, “Whatever it is, I’ll take it.”
8:44 p.m. — How to chase away the Coronavirus-Self-Quarantine-For-More-Than-a-Week-Already Blues:
1. Arrange for a warm and sunny first day of spring (this is tricky, and largely out of your hands, to be honest — especially mid March in Oregon)
2. Since you feel your muscles have atrophied following about 8 days of mostly sitting around at home, resolve to walk briskly from your home in South Waterfront up into the West Hills
3. Have your best friend from grade school and his dog greet you at the gate with a flute of champagne (again, trick to arrange, especially when it wasn’t your idea)
If you should run into the state attorney general and her husband on the footbridge, tell them you cannot possibly analogize the current situation to anything at all: it’s weird and strange, but it’s a gorgeous evening, yet you have to be wary of everyone you meet and everything you do. Add that despite how bloody it’s apt to get, this might have been the best way to upset the election.
“We’ll see,” she’ll tell you.
“We’ll see,” she’ll tell you.
SATURDAY, MARCH 21
12:44 p.m. — The second “Talk of the Town” item in the March 23 issue of The New Yorker (page 6) reports that the divorce rate spiked earlier this month in Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi Province, after that community of ten million was put in lockdown.
“Many couples have been bound with each other at home for over a month, which evoked the underlying conflicts,” an official told the Chinese state-run tabloid Global Times.
A psychoanalyst who practices in Greenwich Village and Westport, Connecticut named Lawrence Birnbach predicts the divorce rate will rise in the U.S. with the pandemic as well.
So far, things are holding steady in Casa Barkley/Loftus, partly because we were so accustomed to working from home for years already.
We aren’t reading aloud to each other from books over meals on an ongoing basis anymore, or even watching videos together, but dinners have been reasonably amicable . . . mostly because we remain amused by, and concerned about, our dog, would be my guess.
Animals keep us diverted and relatively sane.
MONDAY, MARCH 23
1:29 a.m. — The colossal shift in our reality the past week and a half has started to sink permanently into my mindset.
I’m reading a police procedural set a few years back (Ian Rankin’s Standing In Another Man’s Grave), and more than once, when a character has decided on a course of action involving travel or going outdoors, I’ve caught myself momentarily thinking:
Is that wise? Can he do that?
Is that wise? Can he do that?
In my dim memory, it focused on the lives of a range of individuals in Australia who are awaiting the slow but inevitable arrival of lethal radioactive fallout from the nuclear war that has taken place between the superpowers elsewhere across the globe. In other words, the characters have pretty much been bystanders in the conflict, but they’re all waiting to die from it anyway.
In the movie (I’m not bothering to look any of this up, but going strictly on my distant and tattered memory of it), Gregory Peck was the commander of a nuclear sub who was going to have choose between staying ashore to die with his beloved, or diving with his ship for as long as it can stay offshore to try to avoid/wait out the catastrophe.
I also vaguely recall an ancillary character (played by Red Buttons, maybe?) who is either a professional race car driver or a wealthy fellow who happens to own a fast sports car, and who ends up purposely driving it into a rock wall or off a cliff.
I could have this all wrong, because I didn’t see most of the movie, including the ending. The one opportunity I had to view it on the big screen was during a 24-Hour Science Fiction Movie Marathon hosted by the long-defunct boutique cinema in Cambridge known as the Orson Welles, on Massachusetts Avenue midway between MIT and Harvard, back in the early 1980s. (At that time, as old as it felt — it was shot in black and white, long after many other movies were made in color — this film was more recent than the amount of time that has passed since . . . GAH!)
This one screened in the wee hours of the morning so I’d already been watching movies steadily in that theater for at least 12 or 15 hours, and “On the Beach” was pretty slow to boot (despite the premise, it’s a more of a character study than an action thriller), so I dozed off for most of it.
Anyway, as Carole and I sat together for another meal and looked out at the quiet courtyard of our apartment complex, I flashed on the mood and feeling of that movie.
On the surface, all seems calm, quiet, unhurried, and even pleasant. Not far underneath lurks an inexorable, inescapable sense of dread.
TUESDAY, MARCH 24
12:00 p.m. — You know how people sometimes say they wish they could have become grandparents without having to go through being parents first?
The self-quarantine has made it very clear that I am perfectly equipped for retirement, but was never quite suited for employment.
6:55 p.m. — So the president wants to relax restrictions on mass citizen movement within a matter of weeks — thus raising the odds that hundreds of thousands will become infected and die — in order to save the economy?
What is an economy for but to serve and support human lives and needs? Basically the same purpose for which we have government.
What is an economy for but to serve and support human lives and needs? Basically the same purpose for which we have government.
Oh, wait . . . the president hasn’t grasped the purpose of government yet, either.
9:48 p.m. — I needed some distraction, some cheering up . . . so I’m watching the third episode of Chernobyl right now. . . .
Mt. Hood from Broadway, coming off the West Hills last Friday evening.
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