March 15 marks two years since Monique and I entered our own Covid lockdown, a few days after I reckon the wave of the approaching disaster officially arrived in the United States on March 11, the day that Tom Hanks announced he and his wife had contracted Covid, and the NBA shut down their season due to Covid. Before that day most everybody thought of this pandemic as something happening elsewhere that might pass us by. After that day, it was HERE.
Monique and I were in St. Lucia with my folks on a week's vacation, a funny sort of place to watch the world go to Hell. We almost hadn't gone, nervous at the prospect of the approaching pandemic. But there had been few positive tests in the U.S. at that point, so we thought we could zip down to the Caribbean for a week of sun, zip back, and then wait for what might come.
St. Lucia was glorious.
It's fair to say that I had a better sense of what was coming than most. The company I work for sells quite a bit in China, so it certainly caught my eye when we found that China was almost entirely shut down in January. By mid-February I was nervous enough that I amassed our quarantine stockpile, a large stack of rice, beans, pasta, coffee, and a wide variety of canned goods including a case of Spam and at least a half-dozen cans of evaporated milk for the coffee in case we couldn't get fresh milk.
I had no idea that toilet paper would turn out to be the great shortage. It hit the news while we were still in St. Lucia. We tried to paper over that gap by bringing a four-pack back from St. Lucia, which has its own toilet-paper mill. Eventually, the home supply got low enough that we used them.
In late February I told my boss that I thought this was going to be "Spanish Flu bad" and that I was going to go to work-from-home once Covid got to Michigan. Little did I know it was already in Michigan. I have a particularly bad history with respiratory diseases, so I reckoned I had better than average reason to try to avoid this one.
As Monique reminded me today, just two years ago I told her that I thought this pandemic was more likely to last a couple of years than a few months. I am sorry that I was right.
We had our first positive test in Michigan at the start of that week in St. Lucia. I told my boss that I was going to start working from home when I got back. I felt like I might've been alarmist or jumping the gun.
By the end of that week, almost everybody in my entire company had been sent to work from home.
We had flown out of Toronto to save money. Our flight back was getting in late at night and we had originally planned to stay there overnight, brunch in Toronto, then drive back to Wolverine Lake, Michigan, the next afternoon. Instead we grabbed a couple of burgers at a McDonalds and drove through the night.
The U.S./Canada border was closed the next day.
The afternoon we got back Monique headed out into the panic-buying to shore up our quarantine stockpile and to make sure her parents, who live across the street from us, also had a reasonably good supply. And then, like turtles retreating into a den in a mudbank, we hunkered down, pulled our heads into our shells...
... and waited.
All things considered I realize how incredibly fortunate Monique and I are in the way we spent the last two years. Nobody tells you when you get married to make sure you marry somebody that you get along with well enough to enjoy being locked down together for a couple of years. But I'm glad we found each other. And if you're going to be hunkered down for a couple of years, a little house on a nice lake is an excellent place to do that -- even if the "little" in little house makes it a bit claustrophobic in the wintertime.
As it turned out the instead of being reckless, leaving Detroit for a week to frolic in the Caribbean sun was the best thing we could have possibly done. St. Lucia had no Coronavirus. Detroit was already in the midst of one of the worst outbreaks in the world by the time we returned.
I've spent a fair amount of the last two years furious at how Trump and his Administration politicized and mishandled this epidemic. Even after they were justly booted from office they had so poisoned the water that a large number of their supporters continued to refuse a safe, proven vaccine -- making the subsequent waves much worse than they would have been otherwise. This pandemic was always going to be bad. But it took disastrous public health policy at the outset to make it as bad as it was.
I've also spent a fair amount of time furious at people who wouldn't take simple basic steps to make things better, whether it was wearing masks or getting vaccinated. A lot of individuals made a lot of bad, selfish decisions that made this pandemic worse than it would have been otherwise. I have a darker view of many of my fellow humans than I did two years ago. I wish it was otherwise.
Two years later a million or more of my fellow Americans are dead from this disease. Millions upon millions more suffer with symptoms of "Long Covid." Their conditions might improve. Or they might not. Covid was from the start a notoriously fickle and unpredictable disease.
So, other than sit and fume what have I done with my last two years? Mostly just work, watch sunsets and comfort TV, and make fancy-shmancy cocktails on Friday evenings to close out the workweek. Life quickly settled into a pattern of workweeks and weekends. Each week I'd start up on Monday morning, fire up the computer, and start working. Then on Friday evening -- or Thursday quite often, I blew a lot of vacation time on three-day weekends over the last two years -- I'd wrap up at five or six, make myself a nice cocktail or pour a good beer, and congratulate myself and Monique on having survived another week. On Saturdays I'd run an errand or two, mostly as an excuse to get out of the house. I began buying things from local online estate auctions, mostly to have an excuse to go drive somewhere and fetch those things.
This is *not* a good habit for a man who lives in a small house. But here we are.
Surprisingly, the most normal thing about all of this was my job. Most of the people I work with already worked remotely before the pandemic. I was already spending hours a day on Zoom before everybody else joined us. "Zoom fatigue" is real and I had it long before the pandemic. But thanks to the pandemic, at least I now knew what to call it. I missed seeing my colleagues in the same office in person, but other than staying in bed and doomscrolling Twitter for another half-hour instead of getting in the car and driving to the office, my average workday has felt astonishingly normal.
It's all been a grind and an extra grind and an extra-long grind that's been more wearing over time than I would have imagined. But at least it's been a familiar grind.
When I worked in the office, at the end of the work day I would shut down and/or abandon my computer. I used to close down my work day in an orderly fashion, scanning the email pile to make sure it had all been dealt with, then shutting down the computer for its overnight sleep. Now I usually just work until my brain is exhausted and quits, then stagger away from the desk leaving whatever's there for the morning. Neither way is inherently better than the other in terms of getting work done, but the discipline of the daily commute did force me to make a more conscious and complete decision to call it a day.
After work I would head out to watch the sunset, as long as there was any hope at all of a sunset. We can't quite see sunsets from our house, so I do have to head out if I want to watch it. Usually I would head out from our dock in my paddleboat, sometimes in our larger pontoon boat. If the lake was frozen I would walk out on the ice, or to a road ending down the street, or to the boardwalk at the end of the lake. Almost always I'd have my trusty 35mm digital Canon EOS along with me as I'd soak in the sunsets, taking pictures, changing lenses, watching the waterfowl. Sometimes I'd listen to a fantasy sports podcast or a Dr. Demento show. Sometimes I'd just listen to the lake. Mostly I've just been staring at the Sun until it was gone.
If you had asked me a few years ago what I'd do if I had to stay home for a couple of years, I would've thought, "Great. Sounds like I'll finally write a novel." Instead I've become a ludicrously prolific sunset photographer. In the last two years I've probably taken more than 75,000 sunset photos. I haven't written anything longer than a chatty email.
I refer you again to, "work until my brain is exhausted and quits, then stagger away from the desk." Write a novel? I've barely been able to read a novel in the last two years. Stress and exhaustion and isolation. So it goes.
We got brave enough after being vaccinated last Spring to go out and start doing some things last summer and fall. Then the Delta and Omicron waves came and we crawled right back into our hidey hole until they passed. Now that Omicron has passed we're getting optimistic again. Is this really the end of the worst of it? We shall see.
But always there's been the weekly rhythm. Start my workweek on a Monday full of resolve to accomplish all on my to-do list. Stagger away from the desk on a Friday afternoon saying, "Good enough," then pouring a drink to kick off a couple of days of decompression. And on Monday morning, there we go again. Week after week. Month after month. Here we are 104 weeks later. Still surviving.
A lot's happened along the way. We didn't watch Tiger King, but Monique sure has baked a lot of sourdough bread. I've mostly kept in touch with friends and family via Facebook and Twitter. They're helpful platforms if you use them to keep in touch with friends and family instead of using them to wallow in misinformation.
And then on Monday morning, get up, go down to the desk, turn on the work computer and go to work. Pour yourself a drink on Friday evening. Be thankful you survived another week. Not everybody did.
Our beloved Katie the Beagle passed away in May 2020, a blow from which we're still recovering. She was just a little beagle, but she was also a pure, sweet soul and we miss her.
And then on Monday morning, get up, go down to the desk, turn on the work computer and go to work. Pour yourself a drink on Friday evening. Be thankful you survived another week. Not everybody did.
I cleaned the garage and cluttered the garage back up. I did some MG and Jaguar repairs on my own since visits to the mechanic were scarce. Then I fixed them again when my mechanical skills once again proved inadequate. They're mostly still running.
And then on Monday morning, get up, go down to the desk, turn on the work computer and go to work. Open a tasty beer on Friday evening and head out to the garage again. Be thankful you survived another week. Not everybody did.
My father-in-law fell and broke his hip. My sister-in-law came from France and spent last summer with us all tending him and shouldering an awful lot of the load. She returned to France and fell and broke her hip. Like Covid, broken hips are contagious. Who knew?
And then on Monday morning, get up, go down to the desk, turn on the work computer and go to work. Take a picture of your sister-in-law swimming with the ducks. Pour yourself a drink on Friday evening. Be thankful you survived another week. Not everybody did.
In late November of 2021 I ruptured the tendons that connect my biceps to my forearm in my left arm. It led to surgery a month later and a couple of months in a splint then a brace and a compression sleeve until I am finally just now three and a half months later starting to type at something approaching my pre-injury pace. So Monique got me to tend for a few months in addition to all else on her plate.
And then on Monday morning, get up, go down to the desk, turn on the work computer and go to work, typing one-fingered with your right hand. Use that same hand to mix yourself a pretty cocktail on Friday evening. Be thankful you survived another week. Not everybody did.
And so on. And so on. And so on.
In about a month or so my company will be opening a new office and we'll be able to go back into the office. Some of my non-work outside activities are picking up the pace. The Covid numbers in Metro Detroit continue to drop. At this point the vast majority of people have either been vaccinated or survived a bout of Covid. Or both. Have we reached herd immunity? Will things start to look more like the Beforetimes soon? Who knows. We shall see.
And now it's 2:48 pm EST on Friday, March 11, almost exactly two years after everything began falling apart in the U.S. In two hours and 12 minutes, I'll call it a work week, shut down the work computer, pour myself a beer on Friday evening and be thankful I survived another week.
To all of you who read to the end, I'm thankful you survived another week, too. Much love. Hang in there.
