Why is this night different from all other nights? an update chez Servetus

[edited b/c the typos were bugging me]

Last night was the first night of Passover (Pessach) and it was not only different all other nights (this is the first of the Four Questions), it was different from all other Passover nights. I did manage to find a box of kosher-for-Passover matzah and I said the blessing, and asked and answered the Four Questions and recounted the story of the suffering, the plagues, exodus and liberation. Those are two of the main three positive mitzvot (eat matzah on the first night; tell the story), so considering everything else that’s going on, I felt okay about that. I did not burn or sell our chametz (the third one) but I watched the rabbi at the shul in Tampa burn his on FB Live. Two outta three ain’t bad, right?

And I did not drink four glasses of wine. Our house is definitely not kosher l’pessach and there is that pesky thing about how eating chametz during Pessach cuts one off from Israel, but it was never going to happen this year. Dad needs to stick with our usual routine and he’s not a Jew. So last night I made him a meal with both kitniyot and non-kosher fish. That said, he had three helpings, so in any case it was good for him.

Other than that, we’ve been mostly home for three weeks and “safer at home” (how Wisconsin labeled its lockdown) for two of those. My job (“facilitating distance learning”) is classified essential so I can leave if I need to, but with the bars, cinemas and cafés closed, I don’t really have much of anywhere to go. I have access to an abandoned office space, but I mostly only leave when the senior helpers (both are still coming) are present, because the one time I did leave dad totally alone, when I came back, he was playing with a chain saw. This not being able to go anywhere is really hard on him — no breakfast with his buddies, no trips to Flower. HL goes to work every day in a facility where there have now been COVID-19 diagnoses so he really can’t come to see us. I don’t see how this ends for dad until there’s a vaccine: he will never not be in the highest risk group. I don’t know if he’s realized it yet.

I’ve been to the store once for a huge buy of non-perishables, we’ve been eating down the freezer, and about every four days I mask and glove with a bandana I found in a box, left over from Girl Scouts four decades ago, and my winter gloves, and run into a convenience store and buy bananas and doughnuts for dad while trying not to touch anything. We’re eating down the freezer methodically — in the morning I open the door, pick a frozen package off the top, put it on the counter to thaw, and figure out how to make that for dinner. I’ve also made four pies in the last two weeks and we are running out of sugar because I hadn’t fully factored the need to bake into my big grocery buy. We’re in good shape otherwise, and while we may run out of our preferences we will neither starve nor run out of toilet paper nor get especially dirty.

The police are not stopping people who are out to check their bona fides — the only people arrested so far have been either blatantly in violation (bars that refused to close) or people who are committing other crimes (like the guy just charged with trying to meet a fifteen-year-old for sex in an on-going undercover sting; he got three charges related to the actual crime and one related to violating a health order). The state parks have all been open until today, but since people apparently can’t follow rules meant to protect their and our health, most of them will close now. Normally this would have been a really unfortunate time for that to happen, but it doesn’t really feel much like spring — it has been a warm but not a sunny spring. And I just looked out the window and it’s snowing. (It won’t stick.) The people I have talked to around here are all giving off a slight aura of depression, probably because this is the time of year when people start flinging off their winter gear and opening their eyes to the sun, and it doesn’t seem to be happening. The spring tourism to see the sturgeon spawn will be absent this year.

If this all sounds a bit distanced, that reflects how I’m feeling, a bit as if I’m padded in cotton. This is interesting insofar as HL still believes I’m overreacting to everything because he feels I’m too glued to the news. I’m actually not any more attentive to the news that I normally am, though. And at the same time I feel like I’m underreacting to everything. Apart from COVID-19 (someone in the next town over died on Sunday), Wisconsin just had its spring election under hugely dubious circumstances, and there is a colossal leadership crisis going on at one of the campuses where I teach.

Something that’s been pretty constant in my RL FB feed lately.

I’m just spending most of my time trying to keep up with my four classes and rejigging presentations and discussions to be usable in the online format. (You can’t just give a 75 minute lecture on Zoom or QuickTime — or expect a normal F2F discussion to proceed that way.) Paradoxically, perhaps, I miss F2F classes, but I also miss being alone. I find 98% of the advice people have given for how to deal with this period either stupid or pointless or both — maybe because I have always done big pieces of my job from home or from near-solitude. In other words, for long periods of my life I have had to manage my own time and productivity, and the fact of not being able to leave is less troublesome than it is to try to keep dad out of the room while I’m zooming with my upper-level history seminar.

The only irritant, and it’s a minor one in the larger scope of things, is all the people in the media who think they know exactly how I should be spending my days and this is the opportunity to preach it. Like the constant drone of people insisting that it’s important to get dressed every day, and how much better and more productive it will make me feel. Honestly, the best way to add to my stress level is to make some prescription about what I should be fucking wearing on a day when I will spend all of my free time staring at a computer screen. I may not have everything under control, but I think, at the age of fifty, I’ve figured out how to dress for personal success.

And, really. Dad’s income is very secure, and mine is secure until the summer. We live on a large lot so we can easily go out for exercise when the weather’s fine. We have enough to eat and drink and wipe our *sses with. We are (as far as we know) virus-free. The vast, vast majority of people have it worse than we do. There are worse things to be doing than watching the days pass.

~ by Servetus on April 9, 2020.