MY DAY

Thank you all for your concern.  On this rainy Monday, when my morning walk has been canceled, let me spend a few minutes detailing the current circumspection of my life.  The Continuing Care Retirement Community in which Susie and I live has been on modified lockdown for four weeks now.  Two of the three entrances are closed, and the third is monitored.  The main building is closed, all meetings have been cancelled, and our dinners are delivered to our door.  We have been told not to leave the CCRC save for vital doctor’s appointments and the like, and if we do, we are supposed to self-quarantine for fourteen days.  Several residents who have been making repeated trips under false premises have been threatened with expulsion.  Visitors are allowed only to drop things off at a resident’s door.

I leave my apartment four times a day:  to take my early morning walk, to take a short later walk with Susie, to go downstairs to get my mail, and to take a bag of garbage to the chute at the end of my hall.  When deliveries arrive from Amazon, I quarantine them under a blanket – one day for paper and cardboard, three days for plastic.  Then I wash my hands.  Deliveries from the local supermarket are sanitized.  I bring in the NY TIMES from my door each morning, quarantine it for a day, wash my hands, and read yesterday’s paper.

Until now, I have not been sanitizing the dinners and other supplies from the central kitchen, but I shall now begin doing so.

I never see other people save on my walks, when I am wearing a mask and am a fair distance from them.

I teach via zoom [last class this afternoon], I spend endless hours on my computer, I write for this blog, follow the comments, and amuse myself imagining ever more baroque humiliations for Trump.

I suspect this will go on for at least two or three more months.