My wife and I hunkered down for the virus. Sorta. I’m at home, but my wife is at the small local store she’s managed since it opened fifteen years ago. They’re open. They’re deemed “essential.” Her store’s owner has been given a shot at survival and he’s taking it.
Because I’ve worked from home for years and my wife’s still working at the store, our life resembles what it was pre-Covid 19, except that she and her boss offer curbside service now while masks are required inside, and they’re wiping the place down after every customer, and she and I share an uneasy alliance. Roll the film noir stock.
INT. LIVING ROOM – NIGHT
Wife enters. She and her husband timidly embrace before she exits to the bathroom and closes the door. Sound of faucet running.
When we take a good hard look at our hand scrubbing, the absurdly long stares we give doorknobs before we touch them, and the paranoia that accompanies every package that arrives at our door, it feels like we’re living through a The Walking Dead spoof where bleach replaces machetes and my wife and I debate kissing. Yeah, kissing. Because while we share a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bed, kissing shares air and air can kill you. And so in the back of my mind every time we kiss are images of the people who entered her store who wore pointless surgical masks or those people who pulled their masks beneath their noses when out of the line of sight or who lifted them to speak before my wife could tell them — or not — to place the masks back over their mouths.
Did she get out of the store “clean” or is she simply asymptomatic? “What do you mean, you don’t feel well? What feels wrong?”
So we too often kiss like strangers before drifting sleep amid gunfire — exhaling, snoring, coughing inches away from each other as bullets whiz — that we hope won’t hit and infect us while we sleep. We’re doing what we can to remain safe, but we’re married with bills.
But “what we can” doesn’t feel like enough, because I’m searching for time.
I spoke with Mom tonight. We’ve long talked frequently (almost nightly), but our calls feel more precious now because she’s ninety-eight and I’m a disabled middle-aged male. Both of us are in Covid-19’s crosshairs. But my priority is my life, not hers, not because I’m a dick, but because a mother shouldn’t stand over her only son’s grave, not after she put so much effort into keeping him alive.
Daddy died 25 years ago. That’s when I inherited a singular job: become healthier. I began swimming, eating organically, protecting my life, because I have to outlive her. By at least one minute.
But years pass and habits change, and I am now a mother’s child who wishes that as an adult I had eaten better, kept exercising, and traded screen light for sunlight. For just that minute.
But life…
I met someone, settled in, became lazy and careless, rediscovered doughnuts. How many minutes did that doughy goodness cost me? It matters now.
My childhood was spent in hospitals, but I was rarely alone. I was frequently sad, but depression was never allowed the ground to root. Because Mom was there. My mother did more than give me life. She saved it. I can’t destroy hers now by neglecting that gift.
Just one minute.
I missed grades 7-12. Illness. But ten years later, I graduated from a top tier university, married a woman far above my grade, started a surprisingly successful business until the remnants of the 08 crash took it down. You know whose invisible hand supported me as I passed those mile markers. You know.
You can never dismiss dark clouds or anticipate the forms they will take. They are that much bigger than we are. And smaller. Much smaller. Invisible to the naked eye. Microscopic.
It’s now left to us to manage our protection, to “stay in place,” and to breathe less deeply until the current machinations of nature pass us by.
Tick. Tock.
I am in my fifties and never fathered children. I am an only child. My DNA is speeding down a wide two-laner toward an unavoidable end. No exits. A definitive final scene.
I’m okay with that.
But give me those final 60 seconds.