The Year of Living (Somewhat) Dangerously

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” one of Dickens’ characters opined in his novel “A Tale of Two Cities” and for me right now the latter sentiment is unimpeachably true. As I write this on Friday, August 7th, there are globally 19,127,091 cases of the Coronavirus with 715,555 deaths.  At this very moment in the United States a documented 4,888,070 are on the books with total deaths numbering approximately over 460,000.  In my own State of North Carolina, statistics are sobering:  2,134 deaths with 5,498 confirmed cases and 154 deaths. A virtual medical Reign of Terror is waging and the entire foot soldier populace seems immobilized in the ever-increasing din and pandemonium that has gripped our nation. It is almost impossible to do battle against an enemy that we cannot see which is seemingly well-versed in the ability to mutate and therefore create further trouble in the efforts to deflect it.

    Would that this were all enough, the sum total of this country’s woes. But there is inestimably more.  As the U.S. sits mostly shuttered and reeling from the immediate and long-ranging effects of the health crisis, approximately 40 million people are out of work.  In my family of two, we have both lost our jobs.  The current rate of unemployment stands at 11.1%.   According to a post on the CNN website, that although the U.S. economy has added another 1.8 million jobs in July 2020, the economy is still down 12.9 million jobs during this pandemic.  For the 20th straight week, more than one million Americans have filed jobless claims even as enhanced federal employment benefits expired. For the huge number of people who don’t have sufficient savings  to cover even the impending month’s rent, it must feel like they are teetering on the edge of a precipice and the odds are decidedly not in their favor that they can survive this financial downfall.

     These were the things that were populating my mental landscape, filled with its potholes and crevices of anger and dismay, as I drove to the Lowe’s supermarket in Jamestown to do my twice-monthly curbside pickup. The anxiety, already sky high and exponentially expanding with each day’s terrifying addendum of news, suddenly increased even more as I suddenly noticed that the infamous yellow “check engine” light on my dashboard had come on, announcing a minor or major problem but nonetheless something that would have to be dealt with. I said a few choice words to my vehicle which was still moving on with an indifferent automotive air, impervious to the fact that at any moment it could possibly be finished with its Toyota Corolla life and me along with it.  “I’ll deal with this latest catastrophe this afternoon” I said to no one in particular, racking up another defeat on the daily life scale, putting it in the “more money has to be shelled out” category of existence --- more money which was rapidly disappearing from the family not-working-anymore vault.

    That’s when I saw the black-lettered sign in front of the white Victorian clapboard house, where it always hangs on a weather-beaten wooden post.  But the message this time was different.  It said: “Sorry, there are no Christmas trees this year.”  As if everything hasn’t been enough since March 16th when the pandemic was officially declared (the self-same day I lost my job teaching in Guilford County schools), here now was something extra.  On top of all of this, there would be no trees for the many folks assuredly desiring them.   As a Sephardic Jewish man whose traditions do not include the purchase of those evergreens or the celebration of that holiday, astoundingly, those words hit me like an epiphane, a cerebral tidal wave.  More things that would go a-missing?  What ELSE wouldn’t there be?  The food and toilet paper shortages were still hitting many of us upside the head with a powerful whammy but it seemed like the lack of trees was an altogether different type of assault because of its power to affect  a spiritual nerve. Not having these trees felt almost like an onslaught against organized religion although admittedly it wasn’t mine.   This year has brought incalculable suffering and death to so many, massive job losses, food deprivation, surging crime and lawlessness and a universal accompanying anxiety and depression so great that no calculus can ever probably be devised to measure the sheer gravity and extent of that.  Can’t there at least be the trees that were always there in preceding years, a welcoming beacon for those to whom they mattered?

     Throw into the mix a couple of tornados and hurricanes and it feels like we have ALL been living somewhat (or possibly extremely) dangerously almost all of the time. For a native Californian such as myself, the North Carolina weather is now a part of an unremitting siege on a mentality that is becomingly increasingly fragile and I daresay, unhinged.  For me, as a person with an autoimmune condition, even the simple act of entering a market to buy food, do a doctor’s visit or purchase gas for the car at the neighborhood station is heavy with meaning. There are moments when it is simply terrifying and I forego doing the daily errand until I can reconcile myself to the fact that if I don’t at some point do these things, they simply will never get done.  If I am successful at calming my nerves, I leap into the fray, hand sanitizer and gloves in hand.  I take off in the yellow check-engine light car, lightning and thunder crashing around me. There is now a flash flood warning on the radio and for the moment the spectre of the pandemic recedes in the distance.  As I rush into the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, wearing a mask as I always do in public, I see a great many individuals who do not and are clearly treating cavalierly our nation’s continuing and worsening health crisis. The problem is that now everything feels ominous and I am at a loss as to how to dissipate that mood.  I grab the Synthroid and jump into the car with moving water lurching around me, back to my home with its interminable noise of television news and its clamour of something else which is heart-breaking. But there is more:  the largest copper-colored cockroach I have ever seen, possibly three inches long and two inches in diameter, waiting for me in the dining room, I who have been living in a vortex of terror for the past six months. I am even more afraid at this apparent joke played by the universe, one which knows ineffably my fear of scary bugs and this one who certainly is not afraid of me.

     On this particular trip, as I am driving back to Greensboro, curbside groceries safely in tow, I remember a comment I saw on the internet by someone named Robert Wrigley who I don’t know and will most likely never meet.  At this moment it makes resoundingly good sense: “Somedays,/all I want is no news, none of the time.”  That is why when I arrived back home I said to myself: no danger today. Nothing.   I took a D.H. Lawrence novel, a bag of Pepperidge Farm double-dark chocolate cookies and sat reading in my overrun-with-weeds back yard, in the shade of the beloved dogwood tree, now with orange-colored autumn-changing leaves. I unplugged the cell phone, free of its incessant ringing.  Thirty minutes later I put down my book and struck an easy yoga pose, augmenting that with some mindful (some might say: mindless) meditation.  I am doing fine until out of nowhere three yellow jackets buzz around my head. I can feel their fury and their intent.  I leap out of my mostly unstable plastic green chair and run like the dickens into the house, out of the suddenly dangerous back yard with its bent-on-attack insect hellions.  All I know is that I want a respite from this year of uninterrupted dangerous occurrences and yellow jackets can be factored into that kind of list.

     When the landline rings urgently, it is my cousin David in Los Angeles, about to be deployed to Afghanistan with the rest of his Army unit. He is panting heavily and the words he utters – “I have Covid” – give new meaning to the word danger.  My immediate family is now part of the raging health crisis that has brought this formidable nation to a standstill.  Metaphorically we are all on our knees with vehement prayers that this too shall pass.   All I can think is “God, please end this pandemic and let there be Christmas trees in Jamestown for the people that want them.”   I’m Jewish but I mean both the first and the latter sentiments with all my heart.