I will meditate as soon as I am finished with this ten minute write. Tomorrow, it’s back to exercises for me. I should do eighty sit-ups and squats. Push-ups should be forty on the floor and twenty on a matte. So, it is my first week of eighties.
Today, B, F and I baked chocolate chip cookies. We argued about cooking. How silly! Baking cookies is usually fun! We felt too pent-up.
As a family, staying safe during this pandemic is challenging. Intellectually each of us understands we need to avoid catching coronavirus from folks outside our household. Practically, each of us has “blind” spots or areas where it is hard to keep doing what we must to avoid infection.
For example, on Friday, a friend from work dropped by and brought kumquats. I so enjoyed just standing outside and get caught up with her. D, watching from the window, had to remind me to keep six feet apart. We did stand apart, then the mailman arrived and we moved to give him space. We also greeted him, but then we drifted closer as we talked.
D loves food, cooking and chatting shop with cooks. Yesterday he picked up take-out from a new Indian restaurant that opened recently near Hayatt’s, our favorite restaurant. He signed the credit card statement using the restaurant server’s pen: he didn’t have one on him and had not expected that he would need to sign. He did wash his hands when we got home. However, on the way home, he touched the steering wheel, his phone, the car door handle, etc., so we had to remember to spray all of these surfaces as well.
The grandparents sometimes feel it is overkill to heat food–again–that came from restaurants just to be on the safe side, or to let food from the store sit three days, or to stay so far back from the kind shoppers who drop off our groceries. They, and we, tire of all these precautions, even though we know the purpose of these things.
Intellectually we all know that the virus is indiscriminate and will infect anyone, regardless of how nice or clean that person seems. On an unconscious level, it is hard to think of your friends and neighbors as potential carriers and possibly harmful to you, when you know them to be conscientious people. Yet COVID-19 has infected so many people: doctors, nurses, grocery workers, bus drivers, teachers, etc. It is difficult to counter-act our own social programming. When we see friends, neighbors or even kindly strangers, we do not want to be rude or hurt others’ feelings, or we may be simply happy to see them and forget.
We are social creatures, so social distancing is hard. My family is lucky that we are six with cats. I know this, but still miss my community.
