March 22, 2020
In the search for being useful during these precariously cloudy times, I’m joining with our neighbors to investigate how the coronavirus crisis is affecting folks on our block of 1600 Josephine Street, Berkeley, and what we can do to build solidary in this moment of mandated social distancing. We plan to ask some personal questions. The least I can do, then, is ask myself how I’m doing.
I’m 77, actually 78 in a few weeks, and without any notice I suddenly find myself represented in three very public categories: “elderly,” “having a compromised immune system,” and “non-essential worker.” My partner Cecilia, though a few years younger, is similarly defined. These categories are not new to me, but I’ve never let them frame who I am or how I live my life. This is not the way I usually think of myself.
As I get closer to the big 80, I’m not in denial about what’s ahead. I’m not one of those people who thinks that 70 is the new 60. Yet, I follow my godmother Juanita’s advice by always trying to “get on with it.” Whenever I would grumble to her about writer’s block or some other impediment, she would tell me to “get cracking.”
And looking back over the last year, I seem to have followed her mantra. I published a book and traveled to several countries to talk about it. I had hundreds of conversations that made me feel very much alive. Cecilia and I visited Oaxaca in January and December, we lived in Paris for a few weeks, and had a vacation in Provence. I actively participated in conferences in Barcelona and San Francisco. A few weeks ago, with three activist co-researchers at Berkeley, I helped to organize a new year-long research project that will try to account for how our university accumulated the human remains of 10,000 California Native Peoples in the first half of the 20th century, and why it is so reluctant to do justice to the tragic past.
In the last week of February 2020 – only four weeks ago – I packed a short week very full in New York. Being there for Dennis, my oldest American friend, who had just put his wife of more than fifty years into a residence for people with “memory problems.” Having dinner with a friend in a hip restaurant. Going to the Whitney. Seeing a play with Steve Earle about a mining disaster in West Virginia, and the extraordinary Irish production of Hamlet at St Anne’s (“The time is out of joint.”) And giving a talk at a seminar at John Jay on the “military-industrial complex.” Our focus was mainly on the militarization of everyday life in Latin America, oblivious to the possibility that three weeks later there would be a popular call for the military to become the vanguard of a public health mobilization in the United States.
I returned home from New York tired and with a miserable cold that lasted a few days, but it was all worth it and – I thought then – I would do it again and again.
I’m quite sociable. On my daily round of chores, I often make time to chat with the Iranian woman who sells flowers next to Bank of America, with Marcia and Paul at Masse’s bakery, with Peter at the deli, and with the folks who sit at the outside tables at Peet’s. Though no longer teaching, I meet regularly with students. My dog Buster prompts endless conversations with strangers. And with Cecilia, who is also go-go-go, we enjoy a wide range of cultural pleasures: museums, galleries, dance, music, theatre, talks, great meals, movies, and seriously good times with friends and family. A few weeks back we sat through a marathon all-day production of “Gatz” at the Berkeley Rep, and we said that we’d do it again.
Our neighbors Tiana and Dave at 1609 regularly tell us, “You’re our model, we want to be like you when we get older.”
Unlike my daughter Rebecca, who smells trouble a county away and chided me at least twice every day for not being prepared, I was slow to accommodate to the new regime. I had lunch with university administrators at the Women’s Faculty Club on March 2nd (80,000 cases reported in China); I met with my research team on March 3rd (80 dead in Italy); I had breakfast with a visiting researcher at Saul’s Deli on March 7th (800 cases in Germany); I watched my football team (Manchester City) lose on March 8th; I had lunch with grandchildren on March 9th; I took Buster to have his teeth cleaned on March 12th; I met my colleague Jonathan for what-the-hell gin martinis at Cesar’s on March 13th; I played my tri-weekly game of racquetball at the university gym on March 15th. (1,809 dead in Italy). In other words, a pretty typical week.
Meanwhile, I was beginning to get the message. On March 12th, we gave away our tickets (before we found out the show was cancelled) to what would have been Cecile McLorin Salvent’s brilliant jazz opera at the Paramount in Oakland. On March 14th, the Sacramento Public Library Association abandoned their annual fancy fund-raiser to which I and other local authors had been invited. The next day, after talks with Cecilia and my friend Dr. Bob, who dismantled every one of my rationalizations for being Mr. Social, my calendar filled up with cancellations: going for a walk with a friend, a beard trim at the barber’s, my daily gym routine, a book tour in northern Italy in early June, our summer vacation in France.
Now “sheltering in place” since Governor Newsom’s order on March 20, we took up a friend’s kind offer to shop for us. We reluctantly told our long-time neighbors and friends, Dave and Tiana, that they could no longer share our virus incubator aka hot tub, and that we would no longer be popping into their house on a whim. I don’t think this is the model they had in mind for their golden years.
It feels like months, but it’s only been a week since our lives changed. “How are you doing,” I’m asked in conversations on the phone, zoom, facetime, and skype. After bouts of depression, feeling immobilized and lethargic, and obsessed with the latest news reports, we’re slowly finding a rhythm to the new normal abnormal. After years of procrastination, we’ve organized and culled our library, ready for the students who can’t visit us. Next is cleaning out closets and then taxes. I’ve even started doing a little on-line research on the Berkeley project. It feels like being in a recovery program, except nobody is optimistic about our chances of getting clean. Cecilia and I even tentatively discussed that this temporary routine might become permanent.
Still, we’re the relatively lucky ones. As retired professors we have a comfortable pension. We can afford not to work. We’re not one of the half a million people in the Bay Area who have lost their jobs or had their hours drastically cut back in restaurants, stores, hotels, and other “non-essential” workplaces. Unlike the eighty percent of California agricultural workers who are undocumented, we are eligible for public services and don’t live in constant fear of ICE. We own our house in Berkeley and co-own a cabin up the coast when we want a break from the metropolis, while thousands in California sleep rough. And we’re not one of the 370,000 people under the age of 65 in the Bay Area who don’t have health insurance. So, for now, we’re doing okay, but the majority isn’t.