calicofigs

[calicofigs]

Boobs and Butter

           People are very worried about toilet paper and yes, it is a legitimate concern but one that does not particularly trouble me. If it comes down to it I’ll cut up my favorite old sweatshirt that hasn’t been worn in public for a decade, rip out pages from a mediocre novel,  or sneak the kids’ pre-school artwork into a bathroom drawer.

           What I am fretting about is butter and if I am honest with myself,  I am pretty anxious about dairy in general. Presently, I am down to my last 5 pounds and after my father (of the corned beef fame) reads this, he is going to say “Well what about the butter in the freezer?” And I am going to have to admit that I actually don’t have butter stockpiled in the freezer and even though I am forty-five, this is going to be as difficult as it was when I was sixteen and I had to admit that I had just gotten into an accident because I left school without permission to get doughnuts. Emergency frozen butter is not something that he would expect I had in the freezer because of a pandemic. He would expect I had it because I am from Wisconsin.

           It’s not just butter but also cheese. On March 15th when we decided we were quarantining, I told my husband I was worried about our coffee and cheese supply. He assured me that our weekly coffee subscription continues in perpetuity and 24 hours later, during his final Costco visit, he brought home the GIANT double packs of both shredded mozzarella and cheddar. These cheeses are excellent for eggs, tacos, naan pizza and the like. However, they are completely inappropriate on a cheese board. I have a slightly moldy end of gouda and a wrapped piece of something called Marieke Golden from a small Wisconsin farmstead. Even with some decent jarred olives and a good stick of pepperoni this cheese selection would make for a pretty anemic charcuterie.

           So, this morning as I was lightly buttering my daughter’s toast, I could not help but shoot an accusatory glance at my eldest who had poured an excessive amount of milk on his granola.  “Mom,” he answered, “to be fair I love milk and I always drink the extra.” This may be true but his brother left a veritable lake of milk in his bowl with 3 Cheerios floating like empty innertubes and by evening the eldest was contemplating how he would make it through until next Thursday’s grocery delivery with only one and a half quarts of milk.

           Suddenly, the paltry cheese board seems the least of my problems. Glasses of milk, milk in eggs, milk on cereal, milk in pudding, milk for smoothies, milk in coffee . . . And then I remembered that I have been in this situation before. When the eldest was about four all he would eat for lunch was macaroni and cheese and I ran out of milk. His brother was a tiny baby and I was not going to bundle everyone up in the middle of winter, especially when I was producing milk like a prize Wisconsin Guernsey.

           Now if you read my last post you would know that having babies was not my strong suit. Getting pregnant, being pregnant, staying pregnant were not easy. Yet after the babies were born, I was excellent at lactating. I had to pump because the boys were premature and I ended up with so much milk that we considered getting a second freezer – one for breast milk and one for frozen vegetables, meat and emergency butter. So, on that cold, snowy afternoon when my 4-year-old wanted his macaroni and cheese, I just squirted a few tablespoons into the pot.

           The last child I nursed is now 9-years old, but I am confident that I could still be a very capable wet-nurse. When I hold a baby or snuggle a baby, I can produce milk.  In a pinch, a meme of a cute puppy might even do the trick. So, I guess I can tell the kids to use the rest of the milk with abandon. I’ll keep us stocked until Thursday. I will not, however, start worrying about toilet paper until I find a virtual cheese monger and a butter churn.

[calicofigs]

Premature Preparedness

Governor Walz said that he is getting closer to issuing a state-wide lockdown, which is what I think each state should do, since it appears that many are not taking seriously the recommendation to isolate. I am googling topics such as “Should you sanitize a cardboard box before you bring it in your house?” “Should you sanitize a potato that resembles a butt (see previous post) before you let your son run around house with it?” Yet, others are still gathering for spring break, letting their children play soccer at parks with friends or going on unnecessary errands.

 Unless you are over 100 years-old and lived through the Spanish flu, a global pandemic of this magnitude is something you have never experienced. Most of us think of lethal disease as cancer and heart attack, rather than the ever-prevalent viruses that we catch by simply living our daily lives.  Even though most of us share these ideas about disease, I am struck by the wide range of reactions, from sharing every possible bodily fluid on a Florida beach to sanitizing a soup can that was delivered to the doorstep.  Certainly, if we had a competent commander in chief, there would be more people isolating and the curve would be flatter than it is now.  Yet, I still think that a significant portion of the population would not be taking the situation seriously. As I consider the reasons for my actions and reactions, I think my experiences with healthcare have profoundly shaped the decisions I am making at this time.  

 Last week, I texted my friend Jen whom I met almost fourteen years ago when our sons, both born twelve weeks early, were roommates in the NICU. (This was before the NICU had private rooms and six babies shared one large area). We agreed that there was a certain amount of familiarity in the current situation. I would guess anyone who has had a significantly premature infant or has had experience with a significant medical crisis is not finding these recommendations surprising. It’s all a little bit of history repeated – the constant hand washing, the sharp scent of sanitizer, the world shrinking to the size of your house, the people in your life thinking that your “no visitor policy” or your eventual revised visitor policy that involves questions about health, distancing and hand washing is draconian. Fourteen years ago, however, our medical infrastructure was not about to blow-up and so the fear of my son catching a cold, the flu or RSV was not heightened by the fear that there would not be a hospital bed or a ventilator if he needed it.

           This inevitable lack of hospital beds, ventilators, and medical care is one reason that I am committed to keeping my family at home and quarantined.  Though lucky that our sons did not have some of the more serious complications of prematurity, “the boys” as Jen’s son and my son came to be called by their shared nurses, struggled with breathing, as most premature babies do.  Even with oxygen support the alarms would sometimes sound half a dozen times in an hour, as their oxygen levels and heart rates plummeted. Even though, at a little under three pounds, he was considered a bigger preemie for his gestational age, my son was tiny and fragile.  I could see his grape-sized lungs and little heart working hard through his thin skin which was stretched over a chest that lacked a cushion of body fat.  His lungs were his most important resource and days were measured by the length of time he could breathe without the alarms sounding and the fractions of ounces he gained. While I never became inured to the alarms and oxygen drops, it did become more routine and Jen and I and the nurses would reprimand “the boys” when they stopped breathing at the same time.

However, late one evening, as I was getting ready to go home the alarm went off and did not stop. I foamed my hands with sanitizer, reached in his incubator and readjusted his tiny body to no avail. The nurse rushed over, repositioned him, and rubbed his chest. Another nurse arrived. The code blue button was screeching, the nurse bagged him, a doctor came running in.  He turned blue, a terrible dark icy blue, and I heard myself yelling “Breath!! Breath. Oh my God just breath. Please. Please Breath.”

Being the first child, eminently responsible and a stickler for rules he did indeed begin to breathe again and was none the worse for the experience. He went home two months after he was born and for the first months he and I pretty much stayed at home. These were the days before FaceTime and other social media so I spent a lot of time sitting on the couch just looking at my baby. Even now I would love to take the time to sit on the couch and just look at my three children, but since the last family dog walk had to be postponed until someone got another kill on Fortenite, I doubt this will happen.  

Gradually my first born and I went out into the world. I scared a sweet grandmotherly woman at Hallmark when I yelled at her to ‘get away from the baby’ when she came too close to the stroller.  As our dish to pass for Christmas dinner, my husband and I brought a giant container of hand sanitizer and insisted everyone used it. Jen and I planned a four-hour outing to the outlet mall more with more detail and consideration than the president has used since January, when he was briefed on Covid-19.

Since my first son’s birth, I have had two more children. I gave birth to another premature son and adopted a daughter who had been incredibly healthy until this year when she was hospitalized twice for pneumonia. I cannot take health, breathing, and medical care for granted. While I would not wish this experience on anyone, I am grateful for learning these big lessons from the tiniest lives. I am still angry and confused by those who are not following guidelines but I also wonder if it is my experience, even more than my moral compass, which impels me to choose self-quarantine and a strict adherence to all recommendations.

Not all of our experiences are the same and many people, particularly those who are younger, are not acquainted with medical situations in which life and death depends upon good medical care and the avoidance of illness. This is exactly why our leaders must authorize lockdowns, shelter in place orders, and the stoppage of all but essential services.

[calicofigs]

Punctation, Plasticity and Potatoes

Yesterday my daughter wrote a letter to her teacher. I helped very little since she is an immersion student and I don’t know much Spanish.

So, when she asked me how you would say coronavirus, I suggested she just write it in English.  She did. Then she stopped, looked intently at the words, looked up at me, and then looked at the words again. I braced myself, for whatever hard to answer but important question she was going to ask: “When can we go back to school?” “Will my teacher get sick?”

She said, “Mom, should I put a hyphen between corona and virus?”

Her 8th grade brother yelled from the living room, “You don’t need a hyphen but if you really want to use one, you could say Covid-19 instead.”

Now, fellow English teachers and other punctuation aficionados, before you start swooning over the fact that in this time of pandemic and uncertainty some things are still sacred, like the hyphen, and by extension marks such as the semi-colon and comma (Oxford or otherwise), you should know that she did not heed her brother’s advice and wrote corona-virus.

And I for one applaud her and think that we should all embrace flexible thinking and unorthodox ways of doing things. Anyone who has been on social media lately, especially if s/he is a parent of school age children, has been inundated with an abundance of schedules and charts that will help families set routines, accomplish scholastic goals and engage in creative or artistic endeavors. I might add, parenthetically, that after only four days into this quarantine I am not particularly worried about my kids’ inability to appreciate Van Gogh or the Obama portraits or to create something spectacular out of glitter, markers and construction paper. Well actually just markers and construction paper since I threw out all of the glitter a few years ago during an unfortunate incident involving the dog and glue. And as you know, glitter is not really an essential item for which one should leave the house during a pandemic. So, in addition to not planning DIY art projects or taking virtual tours of MOMA, I also have not implemented a schedule that mandates a 7:00am wake up, an hour of quiet choice time, an hour of silent reading, 30 minutes of active screen time and 20 minutes of affirmations and gratitude while saluting the sun and listening to a new-age remix of Mozart and waves hitting the shore.

I am encouraged when I read posts about teenagers who are using up their 30 minutes of allotted lunch arguing about how much milk to put in macaroni and cheese and preschoolers who are pumping out entire bottles of soap into the sink. I feel like measuring the cat’s tail to compare its relative length to that of my sister’s cat’s tail which was shortened in a freak accident and running around the house with a potato that bears a striking resemblance to a human butt which came as a free add-on from the misfit and overstock company that ships our vegetables, are worthy uses of one’s time.

Now to be completely transparent, I have always disliked and failed miserably at kid reward charts, set-in-stone routines, inflexible due dates etc. etc.  The only reward chart I actually made was for the now 8thgrader in an attempt to get him to sleep in his own bed when he was about three-years-old. He never earned a star and spent much of elementary school next to me at night  but thankfully he is sleeping in his own bed now because the other two and the 60-pound dog still crawl in. When I decided the kids needed to do their own wash, there was no reward chart. I just stopped washing their clothes, which leads me to believe that being forced to wear dirty underwear is a much stronger incentive than receiving a shiny star-shaped sticker. I do make a bi-weekly calendar for my 10th grade English class, however, there is a running joke with my students about whether I am referring to the revised calendar or the revised revised calendar.

Notwithstanding my personal aversion to inflexible schedules, I do believe there are other important reasons to wean ourselves from the comfort of rigid routines and become more open to change. In the first place, we cannot expect that our routines and ways of doing things as families, schools, businesses, and governments can simply be transferred to our home. But perhaps, and even more importantly, we might learn that once life returns to “normal” or a “new normal” there are ways we have been doing things that are antiquated, pointless, or rooted in inequity. Already we have seen that transferring the school schedule to home and allotting 30 minutes for a “lunch” period, will not work for students who rely on schools for food and cannot simply go to the kitchen and make themselves a sandwich. We are seeing the way people (myself included) who are accustomed to high quality medical care whenever we want it, will need to deal with test, bed and ventilator shortages.  Hopefully, we will realize that the fear we are experiencing about lack of medical access is something others have felt constantly and to a greater degree. Even ICE is, according to National Public Radio, “halting most arrests amid Coronavirus Crisis.” I doubt, this stems from any benevolence or concern for human welfare beyond that of the ICE officers. However, if we see that indeed halting these kinds of arrests does not lead to the apocalyptic scenarios supported by our current administration we might realize we don’t actually need to be arresting and deporting.  By being flexible and changing our routines we may challenge the assumptions we hold about the way we do things and like a palimpsest our world can be rewritten anew as we rub out the antiquated and inequitable and retain the pragmatic and principled.

I do realize that I write this from a position of privilege. I can be at home and the time I need to spend prepping for the one class I teach is minimal. Since it has taken me 15 years to be “almost done with my doctorate” another year won’t matter, so I can set that work aside. I do not have to institute routines so that I can keep working from my kitchen table while making sure my children are doing schoolwork. And I certainly would not advocate abandoning all structure, routine and normalcy even under the best of circumstances. I will however, find a novel way to cook with that ass of a potato, hyphenate things with abandon and maybe even mess around with the umlaut in surprising and unconventional ways.

[calicofigs]

Corned Beef in the Time of Covid-19.

During these uncertain times all of us must make sacrifices for the health and safety of our family, our friends, and the public. Some revelers, however did not heed advice and celebrated St. Patrick’s Day.  Maybe they were young, maybe they were healthy, maybe they were thinking that it was the last hurrah before self-quarantine, maybe they couldn’t bear to part with their 20-year tradition of wearing green lamé sports coats and breaking into unsightly jigs after a few pints of Guinness. Whatever the reasons, it is time for all of us to stay in, isolate, and give up certain ways life. It is hard, but when you learn of the ultimate sacrifice made by one brave and selfless man, my father, you will know that you can sacrifice, too.

           My paternal grandmother was Irish and despite all physical evidence to the contrary (my height, my hair color, my nose size) my grandmother assured me of my prominent Irish heritage. Though when it came right down to it, the only thing Irish attribute she could name was the dimple in my chin. My grandmother’s children and grandchildren grew up assuming that all families celebrated St. Patrick’s Day as a major holiday complete with the good china overflowing with boiled dinner.  As my grandfather owned a meat market, the corned beef was of the highest quality and though he passed away before I was born, good meat rather than potato famine was the essence of an Irish dinner.

           Though we eventually realized that St. Patrick’s Day is not, for the majority of the population, a significant or high holiday, I cannot remember a March 17th without corned beef and cabbage. I also cannot forget the meticulous inspection of corned beefs that took place in the meat department a week or so before the auspicious day. My father and non-Irish mother would lift each and every vacuum sealed package to gain a better view, debating relative size, fat content and color.  Deliberation concerning the lucky finalists would continue until the chosen slab was purchased. While said meat was consumed, there would be running commentary on the taste and texture and a detailed comparison of the current beef to that of the year before.

           My father is now 76 and though healthy as the proverbially horse, is still most definitely in the category which includes ‘people who should not go out due to age.’  In the past days he and my mother realized that it is imperative for them to say home. On Saturday, my sister went out and bought $400.00 worth of groceries, stocking the larder for the aged Ps.

           Yesterday, however, my father lamented that though they had all these damn groceries they did not have a corned beef. My mother, using her eminent good sense, suggested they order one from the grocery store for immediate delivery.

           -Silence. Disbelief. Shock. Awe.

“But that would mean,” he uttered, “that we could not choose our own piece of meat!?”

Yes, Dad, yes. That is what this means.  The stranger, who is in charge of online grocery orders, would indeed pick your corned beef and yes, horror of non-pandemic horrors, would mostly likely grab the first one from the pile without any consideration whatsoever.

I was not there, but I know for a few moments the thought of a sub-par corned beef urged him forward. He was ready to risk life and lung for this boiled dinner. He was ready to get in the car armed with only a pocket-sized hand sanitizer and spend an hour, if necessary, maneuvering to and fro and around the corned beef display in order to socially distance himself from other shoppers until he could in, moderate safety, find the penultimate beast.

Luckily my mother of eminent good sense said, “Max, we are in the midst of a pandemic so maybe just this once, you could let a stranger choose your corned beef?”

And he did! If he is making a sacrifice of this magnitude we know how serious this situation is and we know that others can sacrifice too.

CODA: As it happens, my sister went back and got the corned beef. I, however, think a stranger might have been the wiser choice because we all know, even without seeing it, that she did not choose wisely and will for years be reminded of the mediocre corned beef during the pandemic of 2020.