Open Wide: The Stories – Page 4 – iblamethequarantine

Linlithgow Rugby Club Male Voice Choir – still singing together

Linlithgow is a small historic town roughly 20 miles west of Edinburgh. It has been the home of a royal residence since the 12^th century; today the remains of Linlithgow Palace, birth place of Mary Queen of Scots, dominate the town.

Rather unusually, the town’s Rugby Club has its own Male Voice Choir, now approaching its 20^th anniversary. It is an active community-based choir with a growing reputation. Our weekly rehearsals are a blend of hard work and a social element – often a visit to the local pub – and we have 4 – 6 concerts a year, raising money for children’s hospices in Scotland.

The Covid-19 pandemic saw many of the older members of the choir start to self-isolate at home; shortly afterwards – in line with restrictions – all rehearsals and concerts were cancelled indefinitely.

To ensure we all keep in touch the various voice sections now meet weekly online. However, Zoom, Skype etc do not allow us to sing together. So the Baritones – always willing to try something different – devised an experiment to encourage us all to continue singing at home. Rod Aird, our section leader, arranged a lovely song called “Caledonia” for us. And, as other Choirs have done, the nine members of the section sang and recorded the parts on our phones at home. These were then mixed together for a recording we could share with family and friends. And we discovered they loved it…

We were encouraged to share the recording more widely and it was posted it on the Choir’s Facebook page as an unlisted item on YouTube. You can find a link to the illustrated version below.

Inspired by this, the whole choir has been practising “together”, using the same rather basic technology, to unite us as a choir and as friends. Keep an eye on the Choir’s FaceBook page for the results…

–Martyn Wade, Linlithgow, Scotland

Now and Then, Near and Far

An old boyfriend of mine got back in touch with me. Hardly an uncommon occurrence. Most everyone I know has either contacted or been contacted by someone from their past, grade-school pals, college roommates, ex-work buddies.

My friend, Nils, lives in Sweden, where the pandemic is being treated very differently. In the eighties, Nils and I lived in a squat in London with folks from nine different countries. Of course, squats themselves exist because of trauma to populations, illness and war; so many dead, properties lie fallow; so many homeless, you take what you find.

Officially, Sweden officials deny herd immunity as a strategy, but they’re keeping their economy open. The young will survive. The old aren’t. They’ve had a devastating amount of deaths among their elderly population. The government admits they’ve failed this population. But the Swedish government also says they’re trusting their people to take responsibility for themselves and to understand their actions are for the greater good.

“Hard to see the incentive for someone like him,” I said to my husband, Paul, yesterday as we were walking home with our dog, Tyke. A bare-breasted, un-face-masked teenager, weaving among the quarantine-sparse traffic on his skateboard had just swished past us. “I mean, if he doesn’t have an old person in his life, what’s in it for him?”

I guess he’d be shot in China, I thought, but had restraint enough not to say.

Only history will tell us what we did right, and what we did wrong.

Who’s right, who’s wrong.

Until history’s windows open, some stories.

–KLB

Pray Prey Pray

I blame The Quarantine for coinciding with my being fully retired: too much time to reminisce, re-evaluate, ponder my vulnerabilities.

I recalled reading Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrilch in 1968. Overpopulation raised risk of pandemics. Then came Earth Day. April 22nd is the 50th anniversary. Thinking back to that era, one premise generated from environmental studies was that ‘predators keep their prey healthy‘ by eliminating the old, weak, and infirm. That premise led to reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone among other National Parks and greater tolerance and appreciation of large predictors like mountain lions, bobcats, even coyotes.

Well, all those concepts seemed perfectly acceptable to me as a biology teacher during my 20s and early 30s. Now aged 76, retired and quarantined, it occurred that covid-19 might be a clever predator, especially honing in on the old and infirm humans. I am now “at risk”! Yikes!

Time to reconsider: eugenic efforts to create a master Arian race by selective culling were fortunately unsuccessful. Would we have been a heathier, happier, or better situated species had Hitler prevailed in WW11? Perhaps there exists an essential human nature and human spirit that can and did prevail. Who might have thought that during this epidemic and unforeseen shortages of PPE and ventilator, some of us might be tempted again to choose among who might live or die? Save the young and healthy? Perhaps also the wealthy? Why not allow designer babies using CRISPR? Perfect babies! Blame it on this New Corona Virus that some are tempted again to consider making those life and death choices. But let’s remember our lessons from the past and reconsider our essential human nature as not amenable to genetic tinkering. I thank The Quarantine for providing ponder time. Covid-19 will not make us better! Get a vaccine! ASAP!

–Ross Greenlaw

Clarity in Chaos

COVID-19. Full state shutdowns and stay at home orders mean isolation from other human beings. That is, of course, unless you’re an essential employee. This is the time when people show their true colors. Some people are thankful and smiling, appreciative. Others are angry, violent, looking at all of us as though we are already plagued with the virus while at the same time expecting us to be here. We limit the number of customers in the store and force them to stand behind bright blue lines taped to the floor. It’s a time where people have no choice but to put their lives on pause. People up for promotion are busy working at home, hoping it all makes a difference when they go back to work full time. People wanting to start new careers are welcomed to do so the following year.

Most of all, it’s a time of self-discovery. No more nights bar hopping until 2 am, forgetting my name and every problem surrounding me. No more losing myself in work and school as an excuse to avoid everything else. Both eyes are wide open, looking at me for me; nothing else. I begin to break from bad habits instead of continuing them, no longer unaware of how toxic they are through the haze as life passes me by. I find myself doing things I am passionate about again, not as tied to the responsibilities that used to restrict me. Quarantine is an excuse for rebirth; to find the me that existed before I forgot who I was. The me that isn’t strapped down by societal norms, depression, and anxiety. In chaos and uncertainty, I somehow find clarity. I never knew what it was like to feel hopeless and enlightened at the same time. I blame the quarantine.

–Victoria McGurn

Caronazebo

I blame the quarantine. Before the forced house-arrest Coronavirus I bought ten bundles of cedar sidewall shakes and some pressure-treated lumber to fix a forty-year-old crumbling gazebo that squirrels had chewed apart in my backyard. I hadn’t gotten very far with the project until I was trapped in my house, sixty-plus years old, trying to dodge the Corona deathtrap. The gazebo is twenty feet tall, steep roof slope, and most of the work has to be done from a ladder. Earlier I talked to a roofer and he took three seconds to tell me the gazebo was too flimsy and dangerous for his crew to roof.

So now here I am either watching Dr. Oz and Murder She Wrote or work on the Coronazebo. We live on an acre lot next to fifty wooded acres. Each day I stand on my shaky aluminum extension ladder bouncing back and forth a bit with each ladder rung that I climb. Birds tweet in the woods. I see white poop drops, insect casings and spider webs on shake shingles. Bats fly out of the woods and I know bat per will give me Wuhan wet-market virus for sure. My mind wanders. How long do I have?

Somehow I step on a nail in a shingle that goes through my tread-bare old running shoe. I rush into the house and squeeze half a tube of Neosporin on my puncture wound. I find a jug of Clorox and pour some in a Tupperware shoebox with water to soak my throbbing foot. Within five minutes the top of my foot burns and turns red. I pull out my foot and drain Neosporin and half a box of bandaids to cover the pain. I blame it all on the quarantine.

–Joe Pleser

Hold that Ladder

“You better hold that ladder.”

I say it out loud, as if I’m out there with them not standing over my kitchen sink, watching them as I scarf down my lunch. The workmen climb up and down from the ground to the second-floor balcony, and it’s gripping. I’m more invested in this scene than in any of the shows I’m binging online.

But that’s normal for me. Spying on the neighbors across the street was always a favorite family pastime. We’d all participate, making the occasional comment: “Huh, Mark must have the day off” and “That kid needs to be smacked.” Like we were taking turns narrating a docuseries.

It was our favorite series. The thing that brought us all together, the story that we all shared and cared about equally. Most families get this from a show they watch together, gathered around the tv. My family gathered around the living room window.

We’d even let it interrupt our dinners some nights. Jim would notice something from the kitchen table and hop up, watch for a beat, then give us an update. If it was really good, Dad would get up and join him. The rest of us listened to their commentary, happily munching on our chicken.

Not like the chicken I’m eating now, which tastes like balsa wood flavored with poultry seasoning.

Now, I’m watching my neighbors alone. I’m familiarizing myself with characters that my family doesn’t even know about, all the while wondering “What’s going on back on Washington Ave?”

Now, I’m missing the commentary from my brothers. I’m missing the unity, the connectedness. I’m missing what it feels like to share a moment with my family.

In reality, these things are missing because I flew the coop three years ago.
But right now, I blame the quarantine.

–Thomas Bragg

Wandering Window

April has been the proverbial cruelest month, in new ways dreamt up by COVID, and in Eliot’s most literal way: “stirring dull roots with spring rain.”

Damn, it’s rained a lot, and it continues to rain.

“Good for the farmers,” my mother used to say. Her father had farmed. She wasn’t a great gardener herself, but she liked to look at the world beyond her window. Six kids kept her from traveling much in my youth, but later in life she took to the road, west to the Bad Lands, east to visit me. Years earlier, when I lived in London, she came to visit me, and we went to Ireland together. The trip of a lifetime. She was half Irish. First born, her Irish mother gave her the middle name Carol for the O’Carroll clan from which her family is said to have sprung.

The trip was “of-a-lifetime” for me too, partly because for the first time, I got to see the place which created many of my favorite writers, and which they, in turn, created on the page. More than that, this is the only time I traveled with my mother in any real sense. I got a glimpse of her in the wider world. The last of the six, it was here I first saw her as a person beyond my narcissistic understanding of her as my mother.

Joan Carol Schumacher was a woman in the world. A woman of the world. In her own right.

We’ve yet to see: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?”

But here are a few buds.

–KLB

The Only Thing that Moves Is the Wind

I blame the quarantine, that I have become obsessed with these little dogs. Under a shield of mountains and sun, at the end of a bumpy road in Mexico, I spend my days hiding on my computer and watching them grow. They are seven, because two died, and all have different personalities. The smallest one likes to bark and start wrestling matches, one is lazy and just wants food, the others fall in a spectrum of troublemakers and snorers who will soon be running around like real dogs, but still blissfully unaware of all that’s happened.

I blame the quarantine that I am looking at things more closely, that time (now more than ever) has slowed to a halt, with the only thing that moves us being the wind. Days go on in a circle like the sun, with shadows falling and trees dipping in the weather. The puppies eat, I clean their dish. The puppies pee, I wipe it up. This book I’m reading has said it’s important to keep the nest clean. Which is mostly the mother’s job, but heck she’s got seven kids. I’d be feeling exhausted too.

I know they’d be fine without me, but would I without them? I love the way they see the world, all big hands and feet, loud noises and sunshine. It’s really that simple. Just the here and now, and nothing else. I blame the quarantine, but to be honest, I would have fallen in love with them either way.

–Larissa Runkle, I’m currently holed up in Hidalgo, Mexico with my partner and two other friends. We arrived months ago to do some climbing and then the owner of the hotel was kind enough to let us stay during quarantine

Empty

‘I blame the quarantine’

That’s what everyone seems to be saying these days, myself included. We’re locked up physically, some mentally, and even though I keep telling myself that I’m better off than most, I know that I suffer just as much as most.

My screen is my life now, I work, talk and live in it. Who knows? Maybe by the end of this I too will become an empty screen, expressionless and emotionless. I sit on the couch looking outside, I eat and then I sleep, I guess this is life now. I watch my oblivious dogs doze off in the garden and I wish to be them, to remain in the present without that drifting mind that curses all humans.

I stare through screens into other worlds, other homes. The homes of my friends, who joke and laugh just like me but deep down we’re all the same. We’re all tired and weary, trying to pursue our lives but being shackled in places where we used to find comfort.

Who knew that our own homes, where we used to long to go, the green grass on the other side would one day turn brown. At least I have family although many are in solitude yet I wonder if its better to be alone or to see the blankness on others faces.

We all look for someone to blame but find no one except ourselves and others. Fights occur, bonds are remedied in an endless cycle. But at the end of the day we all find someone, something to blame. So I, you and the rest of the world, we blame the quarantine.

–Lucas Camara, I am a twelve year old boy, originally from Spain but living in Belgium

Slow

I blame the quarantine for preventing me from hugging my grandchildren and my daughter. Seeing them through the window of my iPad is not satisfying. I see their cute little faces pushed up against the computer screen and then they flit off out of the camera’s view to play. In the background, Charley practices her ballet and Dylan fights and conquers yet another dinosaur. I yearn to touch them. But, I also blame the quarantine for allowing life to slow down. Although I’m a retired public school teacher, I still teach part time, run a writing group for Cancer survivors and tutor. I take care of the after school activities of my grandkids one day a week and, as a result, I’m as busy as I was when I worked full time. There is something to be said for being forced to slow down. I’m meditating every day, something I’ve wanted to do for years, but never had the time. I’m reading more than ever the books that previously only got occasionally dusted. I’m actually cooking! In June, I’ll be married for 50 years. When the kids were still living at home, I cooked every day. However, that was a different type of cooking, if you can call making macaroni and cheese and chicken nuggets cooking, at all. Now, I’m Cooking. Real food.New recipes. I blame the quarantine for limiting the variety of ingredients that I can use, but, still…..I blame the quarantine for reminding me after all these years that if I had to be quarantined with someone, I’m glad it’s my husband. We are grateful that we have a roof over our heads and food on the table. We can, hopefully, blame the quarantine for the rejuvenation of our Mother Earth and give her much needed time to restore the health of our sky and seas.

— Claire Harris Tunick, Tenafly, NJ