Six Months Later

From the New York Times Business Section April 4, 2021

"We Have All Hit the Wall," by Sarah Lyle.

"What time is it?  What day is it? What did we do in October?  Why are we standing in front of the refrigerator staring at an old clove of garlic?  Just recently I spent half an hour struggling to retrieve a word from the faulty memory system that replaced my prepandemic brain? ('Instituion.' That was the word.)  Sometimes when I try to write a simple email, I I feel like I am just pushing words around, like peas on a plate, hoping they will eventually coalesce into sentences."

My husband gave me this article a couple of weeks ago and said, " you could write this."  Obviously I could not--for all the reasons suggested in the above quote.

About six months ago, we left Lake Medora and returned to Louisville.  We have been here about six months--the longest continual time spent at home (and I do mean at home) since I retired.

These are some of the many things I did NOT do:

• Blog (except for the annual Best Books of . . . ).
• Read anything that required a lot of concentration.  My fallbacks were mysteries and books I had read before and had always thought I might want to read again. (Sometimes true; sometimes not so much.)
• Go out of the house except for Physical Therapy and walking in the neighborhood.
• Go out to eat or drink--anywhere.
• See friends.
• Super clean my house.
• Organize my closets.
• Work on my book.
• You get the point.

It was the weirdest experience.  When I was working, had someone told me "you have a year to yourself, with no work-related responsibilities," I would have been thrilled.  While I am more than glad not to have had to work, I wish I could have somehow found  another purposive activity to take its place.

Now, none of this is news for most of you, I am sure.  And for the record, I COMPLETELY admit I had it easy.  No children to entertain or home-school, no money worries, no major health issues, no work-related issues.  However I did slip into a kind of despondency that went deeper than my usual medically controlled depression.

Again from  "We Have All Hit the Wall."

"Natasha Rajah, a professor of psychiatry at McGill University who specializes in memory and the brain, said the longevity of the pandemic--endless monotony laced with acute anxiety--had contributed to a sense that time was moving differently, as if this past year year were a long, hazy, exhaustive experience lasting forever and no time at all. The stress and tedium, she said, have dulled our ability to form meaningful memories."  

This makes sense to me (and I am glad I am not alone.)  In narrative terms, my life became a chronicle without a plot: no purposive movement towards. . . .  

So how exactly did I spend my pandemic?

We tried, in so far as possible, to structure our days.  We either walked outside or went to Physical Therapy (more below) sometime in the morning or early afternoon.  I had coffee at 4:00 (while watching Nicole Wallace).  This marked the commencement of the evening.  I made lots of dinners.  Each night we would sit down in the dining room and have a nice dinner.  (The dining room wasn't used daily before the pandemic).  I did a lot of cooking.  I subscribed to the New York Times food app and tried out a lot of things I had not cooked before. For example, because a blog has to have pictures,

I learned how to roast a chicken.

I experimented with new dishes containing vegetables I had never cooked before, such as this vegetable stew called Kaddu. or Sweet and Sour Butternut Squash).

I made various versions of Pasta Putanesca.  

I made lots of curries from leftovers.

I cooked a beautiful beef tenderloin in port cream sauce for Christmas Eve dinner.

I made Quiche Lorraine (also from Julia child).

I cooked scallops in several versions.

And sometimes we ordered out or just ate "tapas"

 

Putting a pleasant meal on the table, sitting in the dining room having a conversation (oddly we had no trouble finding new topics to discuss) became the highlight of our days. 

And although I did not succeed in thoroughly cleaning my house, I did rearrange my major cooking cabinet.  (See pictures at the top of the blog.)

After dinner we would watch a DVD from whatever series we were watching.  This took us til about 9:00 when we would retire to our respective TV for background noise--me to Rachel Maddow, Tony to a wide variety of generally re-run shows he'd never seen before and sports.  (We don't have WIFI except with our hot spots, so we rarely stream.)

Of course, a lot stuff was happening outside our pandemic-enclosed home.  First and foremost, there was the election.  I am a political junky, and this election was so important because I believed our country could not have survived another four years of Trump.  MSNBC helped me get through that, as it later helped me during the Capitol insurrection, and now the trial of George Floyd's murderer.  

It was a tough six months for all of us.  Covid surges.  The gun violence.  (At the time of this writing,    there have been over 45 mass shootings in this calendar year, and, per The Washington Post, over 200 people shot  killed by the police thus far in 2021, and 982 over the last 12 months.)

The last six months put in sharp relief the inequities and divisions of life in the US: who gets shot, who get a vaccine, who supports human rights.  I am gladdened by Biden's presidency, though I know there are terrible and real challenges ahead.  However, I think Biden is absolutely the right person to lead the country right now.  For me, he has the right values, the right temperament, and the right policies.  How much he will be able to accomplish in the end remains a question mark.  The Republicans in Congress have no shame. 

But life does change, for us, in some ways.  Tony and I are fully vaccinated (Pfizer).  We are tentatively moving out of isolation.  We are seeing friends in small groups and venturing out to carefully chosen restaurants.  I have regained my concentration enough to read complex books, as I used to.  At the end of May, we are going back to the lake. I am dealing with lower back issues (hence the PT) but swimming should be really good for me.  Also I can be outside, with a lake and a yard and a deck.  I will also have more contact with people, good friends who also live on Lake Medora.  And I've made a pledge to myself to blog more often.

Blogging in an Age of Pandemic: A Personal Quandary

[Note:  I haven't blogged for about 3 months.  I debated about whether to post this piece or not.  It's very introspective and self-centered.  But I felt I needed something to transition from blogging before the pandemic to blogging after. I am really trying to figure out what my blog should look like when life has pretty much closed down except for home.  Anyway apologies if this is too diary-esque.]

We got home from Budapest the middle of March.  For two and a half months I stayed inside our condo except to walk in the park or on Cherokee Road with Tony.  At the end of May Louisville entered its early opening up, and I ventured out to see my physician for my annual physical and to get my hair cut.  Then we left for the lake, getting here June 1 and planning to stay until October.

It has now been about three months since I blogged.

The two and a half months in Louisville were basically event-less.  Life was one-day-after another; no narrative push.  Everyday was the same, and everyday felt like I had accomplished nothing.  I had a lot of trouble concentrating, mostly caused by the fear of the disease and by isolation.  I felt alone and disconnected, except for Tony who carried me through.   I stopped doing a lot of things I normally do--and could have done in my Louisville condo--such as reading, writing (book, blog, emails, etc.) and thinking interesting thoughts.  As one of my FB friends wrote," how can life be so terrifying and boring at the same time?"

Now, don't get me wrong.  I am not saying my experience of the pandemic is worse or even as bad as that of most people.  I am retired, so don't have to worry about working from home of losing employment.  I have a comfortable place to live that is bright and safe and uncrowded.  And I live in a state where the Governor (Andy Beshear--remember that name) is smart and careful.

But the truth is that life for me has changed, as it has of course for all of us.  And what, I query, is the role of blogging in the strange, weird and frightening world where we now live?    For me blogging was always about things I did, places I went, books I read.  In pandemic-Louisville,  I didn't do anything--unless you count reading (and in some cases re-reading old) mysteries and other books that don't require a lot of concentration, and watching too much TV.  I have friends who are documenting their time in quarantine on FB.  One of my friends, Donna, who has a second house in France, would always write a  summary of what she and her husband did (and ate) each day they were there; it was like living vicariously in France.  Now she's back in Texas and also documenting what she's doing, reading, eating, etc.  Somehow she manages to make the daily detail sound interesting and funny.  I am in awe of her, because I can't imagine how to turn the tedium of ordinary life into a daily series of interesting anecdotes.

We are now in Michigan in our little house in the UP and life is much better here.  We have outside, which we lacked in Louisville except for walks.  We have a lake and beautiful scenery.  My concentration has returned, and I can read all kinds of books again. There is very little virus here so far because the UP was virtually isolated during the winter, but it is appearing and people are vigilant because of the lack of healthcare infrastructure.  Nevertheless, we have four friends whom we can socialize with.  It's a kind of three-way bubble, and we follow all the protocols: no inside gatherings, trying to keep six feet away from each another, being careful about food we share (everyone has their own salad bowl or their own appetizer tray), etc. But sadly, we have had to dis-invite all the out-of-town visitors we'd been looking forward to seeing this summer.  No company this year.

But the problems remains:  what to blog about and more fundamentally how to make a life interesting enough to record.

Here is what Tony and I have discovered for our version of life-in-the-pandemic.  We recognize that our comfortable bubbles float in a sea of horror.  The election, the protests, the disease, the way Trump is making everything worse.  And of course we continue to obsess over all this.  We try to balance it by acts of support: self-isolating and distancing, donating money, writing letters, keeping abreast. But lamenting the fact that we will not be able to travel as we usually do in the winter or worrying about living in isolation in Louisville for seven months doesn't really help.   Instead, we have tried to shape days that are marked by some kind of special pleasure.  We don't do this everyday, of course, but we do look for opportunities.  It can be as simple as having a drink together before dinner on the deck to making special meals.  (Eating and drinking play a major part in our special days.)  Reading a book together and talking about it.  (Currently we're re-reading and newly reading Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy.)  Sharing meals or drinks--sitting outside and observing social distance--with our four friends is an especially great treat.  Together with the regular pleasures--swimming in the lake, walking with Cindy and Jill and  their dogs, watching DVDs with Tony after dinner--the particular pleasures that we purposefully shape are what define our lives for the moment. 

So here are some of our special pleasures. And I hope that blog posts that follow will be less introspective and more fun to read.

• My Birthday, which always comes at the lake.  Me at 72.  Presents rom Tony.  Dinner at the Harbor Haus, where we sat in a private room besides an open window. Best martinis in the Keweenaw.

• Eating at home.  Two Lake Medora traditions: pizza from the Co-Op and Chicken Medora, a weekly meal.

• Making martinis at home for a pre-dinner drink.

• More pre-dinner drinks on the deck: Aperol Spritz (memories of Europe)

• Grilling at home and al fresco dining.

• Swimming.  We have had such great summer weather, I might get up to enough strokes that I can swim across the lake.

Miami

Tony in Miami 💓 

I was going to title this blogpost "A List Is Not a Story."  I have been absent from Blog World for a while.  Mainly because I couldn't formulate an interesting post in my mind--a story, that is.

Since I got back from Budapest, I have done a lot of things.  Some have been wonderful, others mundane.  But all of them added up in a kind of one-thing-after-another way.  Not a good way to organize a blog post; not a really good way to organize one's life.  Nevertheless, stuff happens.  I am not going to rehearse here the mundane stuff (nothing horrible but the mainly the necessary indignities being older--or really of just "being." ) I will make note for the record of the nice things we did: a trip to friends in SC, a visit from Tony's sister Mary, a gorgeous wedding in SC, and a trip to Miami.  Mainly I want to say for myself that I need to return to a narrative of retirement.  I need both rhythm and focus.  Happily I am leaving for the lake in two days, so things should settle in nicely and interesting blogposts will once again occupy my mind.

However, this blogpost has to be about something, so I am going to feature here one of the best experiences of the last few months (and the one where I have the best pictures), our trip to Miami.

We went to Miami for a long weekend to attend my nephew Aaron's senior recital.  My sister Sandy rented a house, and she and her husband David and all of her sons were there, as were my brother Ben and his wife Nina, and David's brother Bobby and his wife Marilyn.  So Aaron had all his aunts and uncles there.  As Sandy said, with bar mitzvahs over for a while and weddings not really in sight, there are few opportunities for families to gather like this.  It was wonderful for lots of reasons.

We went to the beach:

We went to the Everglades where saw critters, water, and trees.  (Ben and Sandy and I lived in Miami in the 1950s, and though I think I was the only one of us who remembered this, we used to visit the Everglades with our parents.)   

Debra and Tony almost done in by the heat.

My sister Sandy 

My brother Ben and his wife Nina

We walked around Little Havana. 

But the absolute highlight was the recital.  My nephew Aaron Mutchler, Jazz Trumpet Extraordinaire!

Aaron, third from the left.

Home: A Narrative of Retirement Blog Post

We got home two weeks ago today.  Being at home in retirement presents very different challenges than travelling in retirement.  I will return to this statement  later in the post.

Two weeks ago we flew back from Budapest.  We were--wait for it--exhausted.  We had to get up early, make two connections (in Munich and Washington).  Everything went fine til we got to Washington and had to wait about five hours for a late connection to Louisville.  For me, flying west is always harder than flying east.  Going east, you can arrive in the afternoon, take a nap, have dinner, stay up til a reasonable  time and reset your body schedule.  Flying west, it is daytime all along and when you finally get home you crash into bed and get uup way too early.  And alongside jet lag comes the whole kit and kaboodle involved in returning home.

My retirement year is divided into three parts.  One part is travel.  Last year it was Budapest and Spain; this year Budapest and we hope the Baltic states.  Travel is exhilirating, if exhausting, and there's not much question of how  to spend your days.  You're travelling!  The second  part is the lake.  No problems there either.  The days have a rhythm:  walk with Cindy and the dogs, swim once it gets warm enough, work on my book, read, spend  time with friends, etc.  But Louisville is still a problem.  I just don't know how to shape my days here.  I do walk  and spend  time  (coffee, lunch ) with friends (but not regularly).  I do read and I WILL resume work on my book.  But my life feels kind of shapeless.  For example, here are my first two weeks in Louisville.

Susan and I went for a "looking for signs of spring" nature  walk in Bernheim Forest, a beautiful arboretum outside Louisville.  We have had a fairly cold  March, so there were precious few harbingers of spring.  Some interesting items, like a tree fungus, water drops on a spider web, and some geese.

Still it was a lot of fun to go out with Susan on a nature walk.  

Tony and  I saw two movies, neither of which we liked.   The Shape of Water.  Yes, we hated  it.  Pretentious, slow, basically boring.  (We are obviously in the minority here, as it won  the Oscar for best picture.)  Then yesterday Red Sparrow, which we  knew wouldn't be good (reviews stank) but it was filmed entirely in Budapaest, so we thought it would be fun to see the city on the screen.  Looking out for places we recognized was the best (actually only good) part of the movie.  This is how stupid.  English speaking actors spoke English with Russian accents even when  speaking with each other (presumably in Russian).  Logically, they should have spoken Russian with subtitles or spoken regular English.  It made no sense (as did the plot as well).  Also the whole movie was shot in Budapest, even the parts that were meant to be in Russia.  So if you have ever been to Budapest and visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Hero Square (a very recognizable site) you will know  this is not the theater (it's not even a theater) for the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow.  Similarly, if you have ever been inside the Budapest Opera House you will know you are not in Russia.

Okay, moving along.  Other notable highlights. 

We bought a new mattress.  

We finished watching A French Village, the 7 season French TV series about a fictional village in Vichy France between 1940 and 1945 (with glimpses into the further future).  By the way, this is a great series: morally complex in so many ways and utterly compelling.  

I reconnected via email with my college roommate with whom  I had lost touch many years ago.  Writing and back and forth to her has been one of the real pleasures of returning home.  

I read the last chapter of my last graduate student's dissertation and will in May hood my last doctoral student.  This is especialy bittersweet.  

The above paragraphs offer a list of things  I am doing. (And it doesn't even  include the vast amounts of time I spend reading magazines and  watching MSNBC)  But that list doesn't really cohere into  a  story--a narrative. In truth, I  still  haven't figured out how to be retired in Louisville.  That's not to say that  I don't like living in Louisville.  I enjoy our condo, the movies, going out to eat, seeing more of Susan and other friends.  But I don't wake up each day with any real sense of what I want to get done.  Louisville is still the filler between travelling and the lake.  

Still, the trees are starting to bud.  Spring is on its way.  We're having Passover with Doug and  Susan.   Next month Tony's sister Mags and her husband Ken are coming to Louisville.  Flowers will be blooming.  And we're only about two and a half months from leaving for Michigan!

#Home
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