“A successful shelter in place means nothing happens.”
This Chicago doctor spoke the words of reassurance I’ve been waiting for. If that link doesn’t give you the story and video, try this one. You might feel better. I do.
In the mean time, I am following good advice. We have time to accomplish goals. Continue reading
from The Atlantic:
Wash your hands. Don’t touch your face. Don’t go to the bar. Don’t go anywhere at all. Wash your hands again.
It’s a lot. We’re currently participating in “the world’s largest natural experiment in behavior change.” And, as last weekend’s partying showed, some people just aren’t willing to commit, whether out of selfishness or ignorance.
For the loved ones of those refusing to comply, this creates a moral and practical quandary: How do you convince a particularly stubborn relative to take the coronavirus pandemic seriously?
For starters, two Wharton psychologists, Adam Grant and Reb Rebele, argue that moral responsibility can be a powerful motivator.
Also here to help is our staff writer Joe Pinsker, who asked a few experts to weigh in. They suggested the following:
(Gently) remind people it’s not all about them.
Avoid numbers; tell stories.
Don’t just ask people not to do something—ask them to do something else.
Don’t forget to be nice.
For further explanation—and even a prewritten script you can use on that difficult relative—read Joe’s comprehensive guide.
22 March 2020
A top World Health Organization official warned Sunday that lockdowns are ineffective without programs to identify and isolate the sick and anyone they have contacted, otherwise when they’re lifted, ”the danger is the disease will jump back up.”
•
•
•
“…she had warts.”
A local Portland station urges neighbors to check in on one another. A photo shows a group of men standing in the street, spaced well apart, but talking about how they are doing in isolation and making plans to monitor how the neighborhood is managing.
I won’t pretend this is a silver lining here, but a few realities are being faced and some things are getting done. Continue reading
The drowned trees might be from 800 years ago (according to some) or from thousand of years ago. This is the one furthest from shore that appears only rarely. Well, to be precise, all of the drowned trees are generally buried under sand and rock. This one is buried again this week.
Last Wednesday I began winding a warp and today I am a few inches from completing the second shawl. I will work past dark to get this one done because I have already laid out the weft for the third shawl. This morning I wound off a skein of sock yarn. I will knit socks before beginning the next warp in a couple of weeks.
The last person I hugged other than my husband was Paul at the Twist sale on the 6th of March. That was a couple of weeks ago. By last Tuesday, I was not hugging anyone. I cancelled my Scrabble game. We took stock of supplies and are self-isolating. Gary was listening, just now, to Irish music of the sort that makes me cry even before I listen to the words. Continue reading
This morning I compared the message of an essayist to “The Gift.” That poem by Li-Young Lee describes how self-discipline was taught to a young boy by his father, who calmly tells him a story while removing a splinter. Search for that story and you will find it.
“to get the news from poems . . .”
I also received an email with links to
One of them is by Alberto Rios. I have had a soft spot for Rios since reading his poems about death by avocado and because he was born the same year I was.
Alberto Ríos – 1952-
One river gives
Its journey to the next.
We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.
We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.
We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—
Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.
Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:
Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.
You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me
What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made
Something greater from the difference.
I have not donated to the nonprofit Academy of American Poets this year. Perhaps you will find enough comfort in this website to help them continue their offerings of hope.
It can be helpful to spend a few moments each day with language to maintain our well-being and fortitude. As we find ways to come together while apart, please find a selection of poems our team has curated especially for you, from Poets.org:
“Darling Coffee” by Meena Alexander
“For Keeps” by Joy Harjo
“Song Out Here” by Juan Felipe Herrera
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” by James Weldon Johnson
“These Poems” by June Jordan
“Leisure” by Amy Lowell
“The Last Thing” by Ada Limón
“So Much Happiness” by Naomi Shihab Nye
“Cento Between the Ending and the End” by Cameron Awkward-Rich
“When Giving Is All We Have” by Alberto Ríos
“Everyone Sang” by Siegfried Sassoon
“The Flower at My Window” by Lucian B. Watkins
“The Things That Count” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
“[I wandered lonely as a Cloud]” by William Wordsworth
“To All My Friends” by May Yang
When my children were very small, and a long walk on the beach was not practical, I used to sing a little ditty I’d invented out of parental desperation: “Mommy’s going to run around, run around, run around. Everybody run around, run around, run around.” We would jog in circles from the living room to dining, past the kitchen and into the hallway to the entry and then back to the living room—all the while shouting that line over and over.
In the mean time, I am weaving.
January I wove three shawls on a blue warp. February I completed a red one. Last Wednesday evening I began winding a purple warp of over 300 ends from my stash with one handspun skein from a spinner just a couple of hundred miles north. Less than 48 hours later I was weaving the first shawl with blues, teals, ands gold. Yesterday I began weaving the second shawl using mostly purple weft. I begin first thing in the morning and continue until after sunset.
The work is going well. These shawls are intended for a group show in December. That gallery is closed just now. The schools are all closed. Events are cancelled. One of our sons is working from home. The other who works in the theater is completely out of work. Gary kept talking about getting fuel for the car, and I stopped him right there. We are not leaving the house except for walks on the beach. Mail will have to pile up at the post office. We have plenty of food in the freezer, fridge, and pantry shelves. I am not hoarding, it’s always loaded. Gary only worries about running out of coffee. I want pasta and jarred tomatoes, coconut milk and pesto frozen at the end of last summer. I have half a bag of onions and a few sweet potatoes, and an entire dozen untouched eggs. When all of this is gone, we will go out to see what we can find.
My husband is 70 and I am 67. Neither of us have health issues except thinning bones. We walk for an hour or two each day on the beach without coming closer than ten or twenty feet from anyone other than dogs. Both of our tenants are over 65. One just had a triple bi-pass. When emergency vehicles showed up yesterday, we feared they were for him, but no. It was another neighbor who is also over 65 and had a heart attack, then a more serious one and was eventually Life-Flighted to a Portland hospital yesterday.
If you or someone you love has a high fever and other cold or flu symptoms, you might just have the flu (colds generally present with only a slight fever, if any) or you might have covid-19. You are unlikely to be offered a test to determine what’s going on because despite what other countries have managed and what the president keeps promising, our country is not yet, after two months, up to speed.
In the mean time, many people should be practicing social distancing. Many local governments are closing schools across the country, restaurants and malls, gatherings of all sorts.
Stay away from public places, avoid touching others or surfaces that others might have touched. Small children are as likely to become ill as anyone, but are unlikely to die. (In over 72,000 closely studied cases, China had no deaths of children under the age of ten.) But children are still carriers while they are sick. They can transmit the disease to more vulnerable populations, and we are all assumed contagious before we are symptomatic and for at least a day or two afterwards. There is also some evidence that even if it does not make a person ill enough to be hospitalized, covid-19 weakens the immune system and makes people more susceptible to other illness.
So be careful out there. Turn to your inner resources. Read. Tell your children stories. Run around the house. Make a mess.
Once the purple warp is completed, I will start another.
I will note that a friend’s son has a fever of 102°. They could not get a test (of course they couldn’t), but have accepted that their child’s having covid-19 is a possibility, and that it has likely spread everywhere. They are self-isolating.
I should know what sort of fish this is, but I know only that it resembles a member of the seahorse family and it’s dead. Poor thing.
We track where the sun sets in relation to the rock o.6 nautical miles offshore. When it’s north of the rock, we think summer, and when it sets south of the rock, we know summer is gone. The truth is that this shift from south to north this happens close to the Equinoxes. The sun set right behind the rock a couple of days ago.
A massive study involving over 43,000 cases of confirmed covid-19 in China estimates that young children are not at risk. That’s the good news.
As a nation we have bungled our response to a disease we cannot cure (only nurse) and cannot protect against with a vaccine (for another year or more). Most estimates suggest that covid-19 will kill 3.4% of those who contract it. Mostly they will be old. really bad news is, we have no idea how many Americans are actually sick. Continue reading
This is sea foam, not pollution, the product of heavy seas and plankton, not soap.
A family member believes that Paul McCartney has been dead for years and is being impersonated by a stand-in. You can tell he’s dead because he has bare feet on the cover of the Abbey Road album. Oh, and Queen Elizabeth II is a reptile. I watched a silly video of a white horse showing “distress” because the Queen is reptilian or reptoid or something. (The video has been obviously messed with, the sound track is entirely fabricated, and if that horse is shy at all, it’s not of the Queen but of the man beside her.) Nevertheless, here’s what YouTube knows about reptilian royals:
“The Reptilian Collective consists of several branches.
But then again, we are talking about scenarios that insist we need a Paul too much to let him go and both Elizabeths are concealing their true forms with crystal magic.
It should be funny. I laughed, but then I considered that a member of my own family does not get the joke. This isn’t even the person with diagnosed mental illness. If I let slip that this family member voted for Trump and reportedly has a picture of Putin on the wall, does it make more sense? Maybe not.
But then the President asked the CDC on camera last week if the flu shot would help with the COVID-19 epidemic and later claimed (also on camera) that he had no idea people could die from flu. Who knew? His grandfather died of flu in 1918.
More recently, in the 2017-18 season, 61,000 Americans died of flu, in part because “The flu season was exacerbated by a shortage of IV bags caused by IV bag plant closures in Puerto Rico following Hurricane María,” according to Wikipedia. But never mind that year was on Trump’s watch, and he didn’t even know people could die of flu?
In Washington State, Echo Lake Elementary School where I attended grades 1-6 has been exposed to the novel coronavirus by a father attending parent-teacher conferences. “Everyone who wants one” cannot get a test, and we have tested less than 1 in a million Americans for the disease. South Korea has tested thousands more per million. It is only one of the reasons they have diagnosed more cases.
A University of Washington medical team began developing a diagnostic test in January mostly for the heck of it because they wanted to see if they could. They could and did and they have been up and running since last week, providing a thousand results in 24 hours while the CDC needs 3-5 days to confirm diagnosis.
I have friends in cancer treatment, a tenant who just had a triple bi-pass, and many of the people I care about are over sixty. I am not panicking, but I have said for years, only half joking, that it would be a virus that killed me. I am susceptible to respiratory infections. (Second hand smoke throughout my childhood, scarring on my lungs, a history of bronchitis and pneumonia. But I got the flu shot in 2017 and did not get sick.)
Another friend, young and with no risk factors, is supposed to be a keynote speaker at an out-of-state conference in a few weeks and wonders if flying is safe, if the conference will go forward, if exposure in another state might endanger relatives who do have risk factors such as age and illness. I have tickets to an event in Portland in a couple of weeks and am seriously expecting the speaker to cancel and to cancel my hotel reservation and stay home.
It will be at least a year before we have a vaccine for COVID-19, but the vast majority of people who become ill during the next 12-18 months will not die or even get very sick, though I might.
So what scares ya’, Baby? Reptilian royalty, fake Pauls, or large crowds?
An update from Friday the 13th, four days after I wrote the text above. All the public school in my state are closed. My son who works on computer was (finally) told today that he should work home for the immediate future. My other son and his wife work in the theater, usually big shows. My daughter-in-law is not prepping for the opera in Portland today, she is striking the show (dismantling it). All the larger venues are shutting their doors, so they will be busy for a few days striking shows that are postponing their openings or flat out cancelling. He has one still planning to open tomorrow in a small theater in Washington.
So when we think about how and whom to help . . . consider the children with little to do and no school-provided meals, parents who may or may not be working, contract workers who not only have no benefits from their employers, but minimal options for lost work.
From The Atlantic today:
“The U.S. remains dangerously behind on testing for COVID-19, thanks to “bureaucracy, equipment shortages, an unwillingness to share, and failed leadership.”
“An investigation co-led by The Atlantic could only confirm that 16,471 people in the U.S. had been tested as of this afternoon. For comparison, at this point in its own outbreak, South Korea had tested more than 100,000 people.
“When asked at a press conference earlier today if he takes responsibility for the lag in availability of testing kits, Donald Trump replied, ‘No. I don’t take responsibility at all.’ ”
Just for a bit of perspective, we have about 330 million people in the United States. Do the math.
A man called his girlfriend a “chick” the other day to me. He didn’t notice my expression. I was thinking: If you knew me well, you would know I don’t like hearing women called “chicks.”
&PRIDE Press 