In the flux

My husband is at the dining room table making bird sounds. He's having a conversation with a Mourning Dove on the windowsill, making that breathy musical woo woo sound, the two of them whisper-whistling back and forth. Every morning he sits in that spot next to the window, his professorial wire rims perched on his nose, and logs onto the desktop of his computer at his museum. Long chains of numbers begin appearing in columns on a sheet of paper beside him, with each one eventually getting a small check mark, showing it has been properly entered into the Ichthyology collection database, a specimen identifier.

At some point he will take a break and do another Spanish lesson online. From my desk in the bedroom, where I sit editing my manuscript, I can hear him in the living room, saying words and phrases back to the virtual teacher. Later, he'll settle himself at the scarred butcher block counter, magnifying glasses with tiny spotlights replacing his drugstore-bought spectacles as he saws and cuts and sands and glues thin strips of wood in place. Some days he does none of that, and streams an animated Star Trek series instead. Or he might sit in his favorite chair for hours and read on his Kindle, before getting up to start dinner for us. Yesterday, he did something new. He wrote his will.

It freaked me out, even though we have been talking about the need for us to write a will for years. Yesterday, he registered with one of those legal sites and just did the thing. I felt the tears in my throat, but made myself appear calm. He was just being mature after all, which I also need to be. But then he said, "I want you to listen to me very carefully: If I get covid-19 and have to go the hospital, and they are talking about putting me on a ventilator, you need to let them know that is not my wish." He cited a statistic that 86 percent of people put on ventilators never make it off the machine alive. And those that do are left with severe physical deficits. I went to the bathroom and wept.

Here's a recent photo of my son, taken by his fiancee, who can always get that soft expression from him. I long to put my arms around this boy. He called to share that he'd tested negative for covid-19 a week ago, even though five guys in his firehouse were positive. Most of the ones who tested positive were showing no symptoms and so after a period of isolation they were asked to continue working, as the ranks of medical first responders are already so thinned. I expressed relief that he had tested negative, and he said with a shrug in his voice, "It means nothing. It's just a snapshot in time. I could test positive this week."

He pointed out that social distancing in a firehouse is impossible. "We cook together, clean together, sleep in the same room, and as soon as a call comes in, we're crammed knee to knee inside the cab of the fire truck." Not to mention his continuing exposure to covid cases on calls, which have tripled in the city, coming in at more than 6,500 a day. All the hospital beds are full of covid patients, and hardly anyone else, which means that every siren we hear screaming by is another corona virus patient in crisis.

In one month, more than 10,000 people have died in New York City. One month. We have begun to not only know people who have contracted the virus and mercifully recovered, we are starting to know people who are dying—a deacon at church, the father of a friend, the mother of another friend. On social media, and on 24/7 newscasts, the death announcements pile up. I feel on the verge of breaking down at every moment.

We did Easter Sunday with my daughter and her love, and it was a wonderful day, almost as if the new dystopian reality of streets empty but for ambulances and food delivery trucks wasn't really happening. There is a move to recognize grocery store workers and pharmacists and cleaning people as first responders, given that they are out there every day risking their lives to keep us safe and provisioned.

My daughter made a blueberry peach pie from those provisions, and the man made his famous mac and cheese and charred barbecue chicken, and I made my savory-sweet corn casserole. We ate very well indeed, and laughed and talked without masks, and generally shared germs, which is what you do when you have decided your two households will quarantine together. At the end of the night, we all put on our face coverings and went outside to the car, so my husband could drive my girl and her guy home. We press elevator buttons using keys now, and push open doors with our shoulders, and touch nothing with our hands if we can help it.

Out of the blue yesterday, I got a message from a photographer I once got lost with in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. We were searching for a recluse for a photo essay we were doing on American hermits, and our car stalled out in a sand pit, with nothing around us but trees and more sand. We hiked out to the main road and flagged down a car, which turned out to be driven by a detective, who drove us to the nearest gas station where we found a tow truck operator who pulled out out of the sand. This photographer, Steve, was my age, both of us in our early twenties. He has six books on photography now, but back then he was working as a photographer's assistant, and we were simpatico. For a season before he moved away from the city, we were friends.

He lives with his wife and two grown children in Colorado now, where he teaches photography at an art and design college. "Sadly the virus has given us time," he said in his message. "I have been archiving my work and came across a photo of us that brought back a lot of good memories." He wanted to send it to me so he searched online and found me. "I felt very lucky to meet and work with you," he wrote. "You encouraged me to take more pictures of fathers and sons and I did and it became my first book." Is it okay that I have no memory of saying that?

I wrote him back right away, and he sent me this wonderful photo of us on assignment for LIFE magazine in 1982. On the left is Annie Leibovitz, who was the photographer on the story, and the two of us to her right. We were in Springfield, Illinois covering a massive ERA rally that was a last gasp effort to get enough states to ratify that gender equality legislation. As we all know that still hasn't happened, but I'm grateful to have this image, and our memories of being in the flux and drama of history trying to be made.