Life as she is lived

We are at the beginning of Week 4 of detention, and we are holding up remarkably well, all things considered.  The memory of the way life used to be has begun to fade slightly, like an old fax on thermal paper, if anyone remembers those.

Our exercise regimen is simple:  An early-morning walk ten times over the bridge outside our house (five minutes), and the same around 5:00 PM.  I go up the street to get the Gazzettino.  After lunch, if there’s sunshine, we sit on the edge of the fondamenta at the end of our little calle for a half-hour — not exercise, I know, but real-world air —  replenishing our vitamin D stores and seeing humans passing on the other side of the canal at a very safe distance.  Yesterday, being Saturday, there was a continual procession of people with shopping trolleys, sometimes one person even had two — it was like the migration of the wildebeest all headed toward the Prix supermarket.  We heard the thudding of the overloaded trolleys on the return descent of the bridge all afternoon.

Sitting outside is like vacation; I call it “going to the beach.”  As soon as the weather really warms up I anticipate doing this in my bathing suit.  (I made that up, though shorts and a tank top could work.)  Meanwhile, I make do with workouts via YouTube, like everybody.  If I don’t get sick, I may come out of this in the best shape of my life.

Yesterday morning around 9:00 AM I was making my way down via Garibaldi from the pharmacy — finally scored some masks; they seem a little sketchy, but they’re certainly better than nothing.  It was the last pack they had.

I counted 31 people in line (more than one meter apart) waiting to enter the Coop supermarket.  In the Old Days I would have predicted that some enterprising individuals would have begun to offer their services as stand-in-line-for-you-ers, for a small consideration.  But now I realize that the longer the line, the happier people probably are: More legally permitted time outside. Who needs to be in a hurry anymore? Hurrying is becoming a quaint, old-timey custom, like carving butter molds.  Have to wait an hour to get into the store?  Great!  Who the hell wants to be rushing home?

(If anyone cares, I personally haven’t reached that point, after a lifetime of honing my skills to avoid lines.  I went to the Prix supermarket at 8:00 AM on Friday specifically to avoid standing in an eternal line on Saturday — supermarkets closed Sunday again — and I went right in.  Now that I’ve written that, it will never happen again.)

Doctors and nurses are beginning to die.  Appeals have brought in extra doctors from Russia, from Cuba, from Albania.  Thank God these countries  had some extras available, but when it’s their turn to begin running short I have no idea what they’ll do.  Call these people back home, I guess.

The nursing homes are on super-lockdown.  We have two elderly relatives in the same facility, and nobody is permitted to enter the front door, not even the closest relatives (think: only son).  If he’s bringing clean clothes to his ailing mother, the staff will open the door just enough to let him pass the bag to them, without touching anyone.

If you want to talk to your ailing mother and she doesn’t have a cell phone (not made up), you have to have found somebody on her floor who has a phone.  I wanted to talk to Lino’s phoneless 91-year-old cousin on the ground floor, and my only option was to call her friend from a few rooms down the hall.  At least now she understands why we’re not coming to see her anymore; she deserves to know we haven’t abandoned her en masse.

Robberies are down.  No surprise there — everybody’s at home.  Also: Let’s imagine you’re a thief on his way to break into somebody’s house.  The police stop you and ask where you’re going.  What are you going to say?  “To work”?   Try that and they will, as required, call to verify this.  But instead of calling your boss at Universal Tool and Die Co., or whatever, they’ll have to call who?  Your victim?  There’s a funny sketch in here somewhere, but I’m not the one to find it.