Week 7 of the new reality. . . .
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 22
4:00 p.m. — I had an online video chat with family this afternoon: my brother across the city, my brother the optometrist downstate in Ashland, where my mother also lives in her own place (but she’s mostly staying with him because she’s recuperating from neurosurgery performed on March 17, just three days before elective surgeries were barred at that southern Oregon hospital).
We had a lovely catchup. Mom’s stitches came out without a hitch, Ken is seeing a few of his eye patients and getting well caught up on paperwork, Toby has been doing online musical collaborations. Stay-at-home for weeks on end would have been so much more difficult before the Internet.
We had a lovely catchup. Mom’s stitches came out without a hitch, Ken is seeing a few of his eye patients and getting well caught up on paperwork, Toby has been doing online musical collaborations. Stay-at-home for weeks on end would have been so much more difficult before the Internet.
Just before midnight, Toby uploaded his latest home isolation video: singing and playing “I Play Viola” to the tune of the 1958 Peggy Lee hit “Fever.”
THURSDAY, APRIL 23
11:28 a.m. — Information has been and continues to be shitty. We don’t know where the cases are centered here in Multnomah County, we don’t know how many people are hospitalized or where . . . and we certainly don’t know how or where the people who have tested positive might have been infected.
The Oregon Health Authority web page has been dutifully reporting the total number of tests, and positive and negative results — county by county — every day. Suddenly yesterday it got stuck with “pending *” entered in all the boxes for negative tests and total persons tested statewide, as well as negative results in each county.
I just checked it; no change in the last 24 hours . . . no new data.
And all along for the past six weeks, the numbers may have been far too low to reflect reality on the streets because of low, restricted testing when we should have been testing everybody — on request, at least, if not everyone, period. Otherwise, we’re administering policy at the government level, and trying to do the right thing at the individual level, in the dark.
Meanwhile, I have to go out today to get medicine for my girls. I’m trying to anticipate all the potential obstacles and challenges, and pack whatever tools I can think of or have on hand to meet them.
8:19 p.m. — For today’s long walk, I took a MAX light-rail train all the way to its northern terminus, at the Portland Expo Center just off the Columbia River and walked back into the city. After walking five miles south through various North Portland neighborhoods (and taking a selfie with the Paul Bunyan statue at N. Interstate and Denver), I hopped a train back across the river to the west side, swung past the uncharacteristically locked and empty Powell’s Books and Multnomah County Library/Central Branch, and took a streetcar home.
Along the way I saw a Canada Goose and a cormorant on Columbia Slough, lots of tulips and apple blossoms, squirrels dashing about quiet yards, and my filmmaker colleague Sean Parker at his home.
FRIDAY, APRIL 24
A very happy birthday to my dear wife, Carole Barkley. Here’s a piece I posted to this blog three years ago, when we had more to celebrate.
3:40 p.m. — I might have known.
9:50 p.m. — In another week, we’re on course to have more than one million confirmed cases of of covid-19 in the U.S., and more Americans killed than in the seven-year Vietnam War.
SATURDAY, APRIL 25
12:01 p.m. — Wow. On Thursday I made my first visit to commercial retail establishments in five weeks . . . and the Whole Foods in the Pearl was one of them. Shoppers were sparse and easily avoided, and I wore a mask and latex gloves which I discarded at the door.
I hope everyone else there is okay.
SUNDAY, APRIL 26
2:42 p.m. — SELF-QUARANTINE SERENDIPITY
We had a fortuitous set of circumstances come together yesterday: A substituted grocery delivery that didn’t work for us turned out to fulfill a need for a neighbor — AND we got a refund.
First, you have to understand that although we’re nominally a vegetarian household as far as the humans are concerned, we have purchased fresh chicken breast on an ongoing basis the past few years for our aging Toy Fox Terrier, Pixie. She has pancreatitis, which leads to alimentary flareups (diarrhea, vomiting, panic attacks) if she consumes too much fat and sugar … so she’s found herself unaccountably less successful at begging table scraps. We buy chicken breast to boil and chop for serving with vegetable matter, doggie fiber, vitamin supplements, and probiotics.
For yesterday’s delivery, the online grocer “helpfully” substituted several packages of chicken thighs for half of our order — apparently because supplies were short. That wouldn’t do for our dog, and we weren’t going to eat them. The supplier readily refunded our money, but said they couldn’t accept return of the meat.
Carole called a neighbor whose acquaintance we made shortly after she moved into our complex last fall. We’d lent her surplus furniture and dinnerware while she awaited delivery of her belongings which had been delayed, and even an occasional power tool, for which she has repaid us with bottles of wine.
Would she like our surplus chicken? She only eats dark meat, she responded . . . which was exactly what was on offer. When I went to her apartment with the packages, through the door from inside she showed me a photo of a chicken-thigh entrée on her mobile; I was just asking friends if they knew where I could order the meat, she told me.
2:55 p.m. — Here’s my workspace.
Since I spend even more time sitting here these days than I did in years past to do my free-lance editing, I’m even more grateful that several years ago I sprung for “The City Awakens,” a six shot composite photograph of downtown Portland at dawn, reproduced in metal print, by Tad Hetu.
I saw a copy displayed at DragonFire Gallery in Cannon Beach and ordered a copy through them . . . although I was able to fetch mine from the hands of the photographer, who lives in Hillsboro, after taking a ride out there via the MAX.
I’d buy more of his fantastic work if I had the money.
10:23 a.m. — A mild surprise during my recent peripatetic explorations of my city has been the number of free libraries I’ve run across, even though I chose fairly random routes along side streets as much as I could, to avoid other pedestrian and cycle traffic.
They consist of a little wooden cottage or box atop a post, typically chest high, with a shelf or two of books either behind glass doors or set back deeply enough to protect them from the elements, with the implied invitation to “leave one, and take one.”
They haven’t been many in number, but for me to have run across several by chance wanderings through unfamiliar neighborhoods struck me as rather wonderful. One was up the hill from our neighborhood, on SW Hamilton a block west of Barbur (that’s it, in the photo to the right), another ’way across town near the intersection of N. Concord and Church.
I couldn’t tell whether any were post covid-lockdown or longtime fixtures, though I suspect the latter. They struck me as uncharacteristically perfect preparation for the pandemic lockdown.
2:20 p.m. — For today’s long walk, I made first-time use of a custom-made cloth mask gifted to me last Thursday by Harmony Sage Lawrence.
I crossed Interstate 5 via the Darlene Hooley footbridge, through Lair Hill and the campus of Portland State University to SW 18th and up into Washington Park . . . doubled back to the Vista Bridge . . . over to the Lewis & Clark monument (where I acted multiple roles in an outdoor production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” nearly 12 years ago) . . . up to the Holocaust Memorial . . . then down the hill to NW 23rd and halfway north on it to Marshall, where I boarded an NS line streetcar for home.
Here’s that mask when I visited the Walk of the Heroines at Portland State, and the name to the right of me, Matsu Ito Asai, is my grandmother, who came to the U.S. from Japan as a picture bride in August 1911.
Here’s that mask when I visited the Walk of the Heroines at Portland State, and the name to the right of me, Matsu Ito Asai, is my grandmother, who came to the U.S. from Japan as a picture bride in August 1911.
TUESDAY, APRIL 28
12:33 a.m. — The first couple weeks of this, I really enjoyed taking the dog out every night for her final walk ’round midnight.
I loved the unaccustomed, heightened quiet of our neighborhood. Not even an intermittent string of cars coming down Bond Avenue at the rate of at least one per minute (and not a few choosing to roll through the stop signs). No more high-octane sports cars roaring a block or two between intersections. (Yes, we have Cobras, Teslas, Ferraris, and the occasional Lamborghini here — mostly operated, I would imagine, by college students from overseas.) No more bicycles whizzing by in near silence from behind you and startling you in the darkness.
Tonight I did see one or two cars during the 15 minutes Pixie and I were out, and two other human beings on foot — one with his own tiny dog.
But somehow, for once, it really felt as if all the people were gone . . . and they weren’t coming back.
But somehow, for once, it really felt as if all the people were gone . . . and they weren’t coming back.
* * * * *
Had enough? If not, here’s “A Journal of the Plague Year . . . Week 6”
(covers updates on pleasure reading and Russian bot attacks, birdbaths and a dry Portland April, calculating an “acceptable” loss of lives from the coronovirus pandemic, the difference between an “excuse” and a “reason,” and giving in to the Kindle)
Before that came “A Journal of the Plague Year . . . Week 5”
(which includes long walks through NE and SE Portland, tactics for maneuvering through the streets in mask and gloves, the current plague of faux certainties, and visits to the Rose City Book Pub and Reed College campus)
You could also check out “A Journal of the Plague Year . . . Week 4”
(for my exhausting attempts to obtain unemployment benefits, first long walks about SW and SE Portland and what I learned from them, idiocy from the governor of Georgia, my online reading with the cast of my March play production of a new short play by the lead actor, and how it’s all Obama’s fault)
(a visit on foot to a remarkably deserted downtown Portland, my analysis of the initial patterns of coronavirus testing and spread in Oregon and major metro counties, several dismissals of the worthless Incumbent,
(the remarkably dry and beautiful weather that has brightened our self-isolation, a library books pile-up, a visit to the Portland Farmers Market after lockdown, the Whole Foods “early elders shopping hour,” a hike up the hills to visit my best friend from grade school, and memories of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach)
(the weird hand-washing behavior of men, the shutdown of Portland arts events, and the national run on guns and toilet paper)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment