Covid Becomes You
Fern: How you feeling?
Joe: I’m ok. I still have the cough. And I could take another nap. You?
Fern: Pretty, pretty good!
Joe: Covid smug.
Fern: It seems – I don’t know – almost passé to come down with Covid now. Seems as if we forgot about it.
Joe: And maybe we shouldn’t have forgotten when we got on the plane to see your family.
Fern: I know. Unmasked. I thought about it. Too late. But really, I didn’t want to sit for two plane trips, hours in the terminal . . . Covid was over wasn’t it? All that time of masking with N-95’s and face shields, shopping by phone . . . staying six feet away from everybody. It seems a lifetime ago. Did we do all that?
Joe: We used to take walks outside and people would step off the path to give each other space. Iowans. Always polite. Even outside. In the winter. Didn’t we wear masks walking around the lake?
Fern: March 13, 2020. Friday the 13th was the date I remember in Iowa. That was a couple of weeks after Trump assured the country – in that unctuous way he has -- that Covid was “all going to go away.” I had a lunch date with a friend that afternoon. She called and asked: “Do you think we should still go?” We did. One of the first diagnosed cases of Covid in Ames, Iowa turned out to be a server in that restaurant.
Joe: It seems like so long ago.
Fern: And then after isolation, vaccinations, boosters. We were so over it. I think I was more than you. Was it last year when we went shopping and you were still masked and I wasn’t?
J. Maybe people thought we were a mixed marriage.
Fern: We are.
Joe: I mean like you were a Democrat and I was a Republican. That kind of mixed.
Fern: That wouldn’t have worked out. But probably we should have taken that last booster before we went East. You know, the one recommended for people “in our age range.”
Joe: Yeah. Old.
Fern: I thought about it. But I recalled that the previous vaccination caused an unpleasant reaction.
Joe: Not so much. Arm pain, a queasy hour or two--
Fern: Well, I didn’t want to be sick and on an airplane. And besides, we’d had all our other shots. Well, you can see where this is going.
Joe: Do you think you got Covid on the plane?
Fern: I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about Covid the whole time we were there. We saw the kids and grandkids and the grandkids’ boyfriend and girlfriend and my brother and sister-in-law and their kids and grandkids. And our grandson’s entire high school baseball team over for dinner . . .
Joe: The whole mishpucha!
Fern: You’re talking Yiddish now?
Joe: I’m trying. Did I use the right word?
Fern: Well, mishpucha means family. I don’t think Wilson’s baseball team qualifies as family.
Joe: But people still ask. “Where do you think you got it?”
Fern: How could anyone know?
Joe: Well, I know where I got Covid. From you.
Fern: At least you didn’t have to fly home with it. Masked and coughing. I felt as if my throat was coated in cut glass.
Joe: Strange to say, but I have to admit I felt a kind of relief when we got home and I tested positive.
Fern: You’re right, that is strange. But I get what you mean.
Joe: And I liked the idea of having to drop everything, forget our obligations. Just make chicken soup and cross days off the calendar.
Fern: Well Hon, we’re retired. I cancelled a hair appointment and a lunch date. You didn’t go to poker. Not as if we really stopped the clock.
Joe: We binge-watched television (Love and Death was so well done). I read more than usual. Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey, which I started out feeling meh about and ended up really liking.
Fern: Fever or no fever I recommend Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland. It’s about the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan in 1920’s Indiana. And Jeffrey Toobin’s Homegrown, about the Oklahoma City Bombing and how the January 6 attack on the Capitol was an offshoot of that and Waco and Ruby Ridge. The older I get the more I want to read historians and social scientists and writers who research the past.
Joe: The more we read the more we see how interconnected things are in our world. The Ku Klux Klan does not arise out of a vacuum. People don’t blow up buildings or attack democracy without reasons, no matter how distorted. Faulkner said, “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.”
Fern: Faulkner said that? I thought it might have been Seinfeld.
Joe: It’s Faulkner. “Requiem for a Nun.” I’ve only just started reading Jonathan Kennedy’s Pathenogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues. He starts out discussing microorganisms, which are so numerous that the total mass of bacteria on our planet is a thousand times the weight of all the humans.
Fern: That’s a lot of germs. Which brings us back to Covid. How are you feeling today?
Joe: Better. Grateful. Abashed..
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Better to laugh than cry, I suppose. I’ve stopped wearing a mask with the exception of flying. Seems I almost always got sick after flying even before Covid.
I woke up coughing today. Our air quality stinks. Or it could be long Covid. Who knows?