Strange Times

It’s something of a jolt to realize that self-isolating isn’t all that much different from my usual life. I see Michael every day, get to the grocery and the drugstore once a week, and make semi-regular post office and bank runs but apart from that, unless I’m photographing a music performance or an animal event, I don’t have much interaction with my fellow human beings. I’ve come to think of it as blessing in disguise.

You’d hardly know anything was amiss until you start registering the closed signs and empty parking lots, the deserted streets and abandoned playgrounds. The city is suddenly quieter, barren almost like some film noir street scene. With the bars and restaurants and casinos shut down, downtown is desolate after five o’clock and even the riverfront is eerily still and silent.

A handful of coffee shops and delicatessens are still offering curbside takeout but more give up every day. The brewery where I spend do much time photographing musicians closes along with the few museums and art galleries we have, art and music festivals that have survived for years are canceled, the grocery stores cut their hours and begin rationing, some of the banks go to half days. All public schools are closed and there’re rumors they may not re-open at all this year. Any gathering of 50 or more people is prohibited and there’s beginning to be talk of curfews and martial law. We seems to be caught between a war zone and a plague novel. I spend my time telling myself not to panic but not too far below the surface is the fear that life as we’ve always known it, will never be the same. Everything we have taken for granted for all of our lives suddenly feels fragile and at risk. I’m feeling desperate for someone to blame.

At just past 7 in the morning, the grocery store is unusually crowded and for the first time I have a sense - just a hint, but enough to make me notice – of desperation and disaster. The familiar faces I see every week are strained and the smiles I’ve come to expect are forced. The shoppers, most in masks and protective clothing, dodge and weave through the aisles, snatching at the shelves and avoiding each other as best they can. The paper goods aisle is completely gutted – not a roll of tissue paper or paper towels or even a box of kleenex to be had. Each cash register features a prominent list of those items that are purchase-limited. Clearly stressed out managers are manning the check out lines and doing their best to soothe irate customers. This is a high end grocery store and heated arguments over who saw it first are pretty much foreign. It feels like dread.

I add low dose aspirin, Metamucil, and Ghirardelli caramel squares to my cart of cat and dogfood and litter and decide I can make do without anything I’ve forgotten. A line from Prairie Home Companion runs through my mind – “Fred’s Pretty Good Grocery, If we don’t have it, you can probably live without it.” Later I will make a 2^nd run for diet coke and cigarettes but for now I find I just want to be home with my animals and away from the craziness we have brought into our lives.

Staying in Your Lane

The town I grew up in was divided roughly into three sections – The Heights, where the money and privilege and bound-to-be-successful lived, The East, mostly single family homes, mostly middle to lower class, and The East End, a down at the heels section on the Cambridge line where the homes were mostly triple deckers and very close to poor. Not everyone spoke English in The East End, the families were almost always renters rather than home owners, and the whole shabby neighborhood was dark and smoky and smelled of cooking grease. Those from The East might hurriedly pass through it on their way to the better sections of Cambridge. Those from The Heights barely acknowledged its existence.

Much to the dismay of my mother, I had a half dozen friends who lived in The East End (we all went to The East Junior High) and only one who lived in the Heights, and went to The West Junior High. We would all be thrown unceremoniously together for high school but 7^th and 8^th grade were (and still are) two very different schools, two different neighborhoods, and two very distinct classes of society. My mother, an only child of relatively well off parents and fond of telling anyone who would listen that she had married beneath her, did her best to keep me from my lesser friends. We clashed often and sometimes violently and my daddy often had to step in to restore some sort of order. He hadn’t much enthusiasm for it.

June was my closet East End friend. She was tall and lean and long legged, the captain of the girls basketball team and the closest thing to a star athlete that we had. She and I had been friends since elementary school when status and zip codes didn’t matter so much. She came from a raucous and sprawling Italian family with four older brothers and a grandmother who spoke only her native language and her third floor home was always crowded and noisy with friends and family and music and an assortment of dogs and cats.

By comparison, my friend Dawn lived in a two story brick house just off Pleasant Street with a circular driveway, manicured lawn, three car garage and a sour-faced housekeeper. Nobody ever played the grand piano in the formal living room and the entire house had a sterile feel to it, even Dawn’s room was pastel’d and antiqued and un-lived in. Her collection of stuffed animals was arranged in a neat row on a shelf above her four poster bed but it was clear they were never loved or played with. Things in Dawn’s house were for show, not for handling and but for the fact that her family and mine went to the same Baptist church, we’d never have been friends to begin with.

High school brought very few changes – the natural order of things continued. Dawn and her crowd were cheerleaders and debate club members, honor students and class presidents, homecoming royalty and prom stars. June and her friends were athletes, got good but unnoticed grades and sang in the chorus. Dawn and her crowd drove shiny new convertible cars and June and her friends took the bus. The haves and the have nots kept to their own lanes and no one questioned the way things worked. And then, one unsuspecting spring, there was a fire at the high school and half the buildings went up in flames. It meant split sessions for the remainder of the school year – half of us left for school in the dark, half of us came home in the dark. None of us were happy and we never saw that it might’ve been an opportunity to build a bridge rather than another wall.

There are times when I think how little has changed.

The Devil's Work

I can feel myself slipping into the black mood. It’s like a veil wrapping ‘round me, tangled and thick and very troublesome. We are starting a fourth day of rain and cold, raw temperatures. I’m cabin fevered weary of gray skies and gutters filled with dirty water. And stupidity. Especially stupidity.

It starts with the letter carrier leaving a bundle of mail and a package of photographs tossed indifferently onto the cement of the front porch during a rainstorm. It’s not the first time the lazy, inept and dull witted cow has done this but it’s the first time there were professional photographs in the mix. Through a supervisor, she denies it and I flat out call her a liar and come perilously close to losing my temper. I have a strong sense that this is not the first time someone has complained about her and her supervisor assures me she’ll have a serious sit down with her as soon as she reports to work. Oddly enough, I don’t hear anything further and for some mysterious reason, we receive no mail delivery. When I called to report her, there was a “greater than one hour “ wait time. It told me all I needed to know about the state of the US mail service.

The second war is with the scandal ridden water department. The water pressure crashes unexpectedly and it takes over two hours to reach them. They tell me that they’re unable to reach the service department and give me the number to call directly to see is there’s a water main break in the neighborhood. Another hour and a half of trying to reach the service people and I call the mayor’s office. There, I’m referred back to the water department who – only after I press and press hard – own up to the fact that we’ve been disconnected for non-payment. I suggest that they might’ve shared this information with me when I first called and I can practically hear them shrugging. They’re open until 5:30. so they tell me grudgingly, but when I get there at 5 minutes after 4, they’re closed. Liars and thieves, the whole lot of them, I tell the deputies who refuse to let me in. They’re sympathetic but unmoved.

The next morning I leave early and take care of the water bill. That afternoon we have a new mail carrier who has no trouble locating and using the mail slot. I doubt we’ve turned a corner but it’s possible we’re at least on the right street. I was on my way up and out of the darkness when Michael pointed out to me that the trash hadn’t been picked up the day before. I suggested he likely hadn’t put it to the curb in time but that only fanned the flames so I shrugged and said I’d call. In the next couple of minutes, rather than just apologize and say they’d come get it as they always have in the past, the sanitation department upped their game and I found myself in a heated argument about whether we were a business or a residence. I learned all about their “commercial customer list”, about how the trucks wouldn’t pick up if they thought we were a business, and about how the poor, undeserving civil servants at City Hall were abused. She wanted to know if we had a sign on the property and then said that we certainly had a large parking lot for a residence. She had called us up on Google she informed me with more than a hint of self-righteousness and a definite “see what I can do” tone.

“There’s no damn sign on the property,” I snapped, “and the parking lot isn’t even our’s!, it belongs to the medical building next door! Why are you making this a federal case? All I need is for the damn trash to be picked up!”

This earned me a second lecture on sanitation department policies and procedures. It was futile to point out that we’d been at our current address for several years now and it being a residence or business had never mattered before. Bureaucracy, as a friend of mine recently remarked, is the Devil’s work.