Another Tuesday

Almost every night for dinner, I make myself tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. This is my comfort food right now. I will likely associate tomato soup with this period of quarantine forever more. I feel strangely disconnected from myself, as if I can't tell what I am feeling. I'm going through the motions, diligently editing my manuscript and getting through the days, each one much like the one before. "Tuesday?" I said to my husband when I awoke this morning. "Yes," he confirmed.

I have a pesky cough, feels like allergies. My joints ache something fierce. Every night I survey my symptoms, wondering if I am getting sick, and then I wake the next morning, no worse than the day before. They say the curve of new Covid-19 cases in New York is flattening. Yet every day people are still dying alone in hospitals, their families able to say goodbye to them only through electronic devices arranged by merciful nurses. On the news at night, reporters interview the nurses. They sob through their words. They had no idea this sort of tragedy would become such an unrelenting part of their jobs. I worry for them. How changed will they be when all this is behind us? Which will be when exactly?

I'm not rushing anything, even though the idiot in the White House keeps inciting other idiots with assault rifles to storm their state capitols in protest of stay-at-home guidelines issued by his own administration. I'm doing my best to ignore him, listening instead to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's updates and taking it day by day. A British commentator, Nate White, wrote the best summation of Trump that I have seen anywhere—other than from Mary Moon, of course. My favorite line: "God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid."  

A lensman named Bruce Byers is doing a series on Instagram that he's calling "Heroes: Looking Into Their Tired Eyes." He's photographing people on the frontlines of the pandemic in our city. This weekend, he posted an image of my son. My daughter said, "His eyes look like he's smiling behind the mask." I looked into those eyes for a long time.