Pandemic Blues
The young Indigenous man jumped to open the bank door for me even though I was reaching for the button. I said Thanks, he said Welcome, and it was a small feel-good interaction, but I upped it a bit by adding “Nice hair”. His turn to say Thanks and seemed delighted. (Side note – a lot of the Indig. Youth are into helping Elders of whatever persuasion.)
It was a real hair day in the bank. The black teller had a fantastic head of multiple long braids (side note – read an article recently about the unspoken but carefully followed English grammar rule concerning the order of adjectives…I hesitated re “multiple” and “long”), the two Cauc clerks (full staff today, despite the only-4-customers-inside rule & really small bank) had long smooth pale hair. The South Asian woman who dealt with my matter had dark brown hair in the current bed-head style, but with deep golden streaks. Well, I guess with it being winter and all, I haven’t seen all that much hair lately (touque season in Canada), and with masks there aren’t full faces to look at any more…and I haven’t seen much of anything in the way of humankind lately* (thank goodness for TV and mirrors) and revisited my periodic wonder at the strange wild growth on our scalps while we are otherwise mostly bald.
[* Reminds me of the time decades ago when I spent some time in South India, where the people are slender, dark and tilt backwards…and one day I saw this blobby forward-leaning ghostly white guy striding down the street and thought, OMG, that’s what we look like? (photographs from the time of me with locals confirm)]
[Speaking of hair and TV, I think Colbert and Noah look better with longer hair (and casual clothes – I really hate men’s suits); the only other late-nite host I follow, Myers, isn’t sporting noticeably longer hair.]
Recently read an article about how in lock-down days we are suffering not just from being cut off from friends and relatives, but also from all the people we don’t know but share society with and all the attendant mini-interactions (“Excuse me,” “You first,” “Do you know what time it is.”) Now we avoid each other, pull away & turn faces away in the grocery aisles. (But the check-out clerks in this small town still chat as they ring up your stuff…..which, of course, you have to pack yourself in your bags that must not touch the counter – at least I no longer fret about the cat hair on them).
It’s like we should all be going around ringing bells and shouting “Unclean, unclean.”
After the bank I went to the grocery. Encountered Reno Rob in the parking lot. I was hobbling so he offered me his arm. I hesitated for a nano-second, but figured he was safe (grocery was about his only outing, and I’m more concerned with air-transmission…and he was wearing a mask [probably, come to think of it, the same one he got from me months ago when he realized that he wasn’t going to be able to get his groceries otherwise {note to self – next time I see him, press a fresh supply upon him}. Anyway, a nice gesture…and I realized afterwards that that was the first time in many months when I’d touched or been touched by another human being. Used to be my women friends and I exchanged hugs, maybe kisses, upon parting. Now I don’t even see them. One is totally holed up, incommunicado. Another I talk to on the phone occasionally, and another only by brief emails. My oldest-friend-in-town talks by Facebook messenger and we sometimes see each other across the front yard when she’s getting back in the car after leaving me something on the front step (lately it’s often been honey-cream cake; I have been consulting cookbooks for something to follow up on my not-so-recent reciprocity, cider bread). I get ready-made meals delivered – sometimes glimpse the chef/delivery person as she departs.
After outings to grocery, pharmacy or post office (no home delivery here), I often just drive down our few blocks of main street, just to see some world and hopefully denizens thereof. It’s winter, and pandemic, so there aren’t many people to be seen. A couple of oddly-dressed shouters on the corner in front of town hall, some bundled-up miserables on the park benches, some people walking their (sob) dogs (mine are in jars by the door)…a few ‘normal’ pedestrians scurrying back to their cars…
People here seem to be masking and distancing appropriately (even those, and Reno Rob and honey-cake woman are among them, who are doubters), but someone on a Facebook group claimed our provincial Human Rights Commissioner acknowledged the (to me dubious) existence of people with medical claims of exemption. I looked it up, and yes. Then the next little section said maskless people shouldn’t be challenged or asked to provide any proof. WHAT ABOUT OUR RIGHT NOT TO BE EXPOSED I said, in my indignant letter to the Commission. (I got a bedbug letter back, of course.) I think that don’t-ask-don’t-require-to-tell is supposed to refer back to the mythical beings who can’t mask up (or stay the hell home), but it doesn’t say so, and is what to the naked eye appears to be a stand-alone clause. And, with it not being spelled out, people are gonna take advantage. We’re not only funny-looking creatures with weird stuff growing out of our heads, but we’re extremely annoying nitwits.
Hoping you are the same (as a friend of mine long ago used to sign off his essays).
P.S. – Accidentally put mask on wrong-way-up, thus the (EEEK) inverted pentagram…but it may ward off virus. (Good mask, double-layer, slot for filter…)
jpHart
01/28/2021 @ 10:54 pm
Hell-well it’s not for lack of crying. An honest sane cosmos would have at this late hour effused rain clouds misting vaccine. [[Back in the 1950’s Piper-Cubs plumed our blue umbrella skies with insecticide fog and our gutters were slick with dead mosquitoes. Decade and a half later or such the toxins were labeled carcinogenic and correlated to an exasperation of lymphomas]] This cruel and inhumane polarization-politicization of precautionary preventive nickel and dime sundry safeguards e.g. masks polite distancing and quasi hibernation is hard to forgive. Perhaps comes a great potion, no? This slo-mo line up to get stabbed with a sharp object does not exemplify out of the box empiricism. Where in the blazes is that Marshall Plan-like fortitude– that fervor– to cure the beast? Can’t we simply aerosol the serum into paper bags and take a deep breath? Just sayin’ I do not see that we’re peeling back the mushroom fast enuff…a year has come and gone.
koshersalaami
01/29/2021 @ 6:58 pm
Glad I’m married. I go to the supermarket once in a while. Everyone’s masked here (go farther south and they’re not all). Still, careful. Don’t want to catch it after all this time.
Jonna Connelly
01/30/2021 @ 7:11 am
I’m tempted to go to the dog park though I have no dog — both to see dogs and to socialize maskless but distantly. But II love punching a grocery order into my phone and driving up to Target to have it brought out to me. The same at some local restaurants. I visit twice a week at the nursing home with my sister, exclusively inside her room, masked and shielded which works havoc on my COPD. Am getting vaccinated in that role. Have had the first one so far. My hair, now, that’s just hopeless though one of the kids over at my Indian neighbors has got the most gorgeous hair long, pure blue-black, I’ve ever seen.
01/30/2021 @ 1:21 pm
Myriad, you have the loveliest hair, shiny snowy white and so long now. I just cut nearly a foot from mine, it had gotten thin and become a pain in the butt to care for.
You have a good pandemic routine. I’ve found that an introverted personality turns out to be an asset during a pandemic. I have too many daily zooms to enjoy the internet much these days, but enjoy only having to look presentable from the waist up. I have three pair of black leggings to wear as bottoms for sleeping, zooming, walking, just throw them in the washer and dryer, put on a clean pair, and am off. I will miss being able to do that once covid is over.
Like Jonna, I do grocery store pick up. The supermarket chain has made it almost too easy. You make a ‘list’ of the things you use and toss things from that in a ‘cart’, then drive to the store, open the trunk, and someone comes out and puts bags in. They only charge three dollars for pick up, but I suspect the products cost more than they do if you wander inside the store to purchase. As a treat, about once a week I order a meal from our local vegan restaurant which now offers curbside pick up. I look forward to it all day, then swoop over. There is a legal pot shop not far from there and a couple times, I’ve thought about it, then say nah. A friend reports that they are doing a brisk business though. I bet!
I like that: hope you are the same 🙂
ArtWStone
01/31/2021 @ 11:07 am
I left the city to live in a small coastal town. Here the street corner shouters are fewer, and the functionally cognitive yet loopy all know me and vice versa on a first name basis. Nobody bothers with last names.
I see greenheron beat me to it : “hoping you are the same”.