The Gift and Grief of Turning 40 in a Pandemic . . . and Seat-Back Pockets

I miss airplanes. Even their metal-tang stench and those feculent seat-back pockets stuffed with crumbled tissues and cryptic wrappers. I mourn the long winding lines through the maze of security that made me feel like world’s most patient gerbil. And that bottle of Hint water I’d buy as an indulgence for $3.99 in Terminal One whenever I flew United through O’Hare. (The blackberry essence really does elevate the tap water they put in there.)

                Travel was both my career and my hobby. This year, the pandemic torched not only my profession, but various trips to: Vancouver, the Outer Banks, Cape Cod, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia to see Angkor Wat (that one stings).

                I know, woe is me. Cue the violins. I recognize that I dangle from a parachute of privilege. I don’t deserve a dust mote of sympathy.

                Despite all the knock-backs 2020 has doled out, my family is, for the most part, all healthy. We have not lost our home to ravaging wild fires or simultaneous hurricanes or suffered at the hands of systemic racism. We are breathing clean air. We can afford bread and milk and even cave-aged-Gruyére. My mom owns a cabin 90-minutes away in Michigan that allows us to escape our increasingly oppressive four walls. We survived the summer, thanks to an Intex inflatable pool and Steve Jobs’ enduring technologies.

                We are luckier than most, even as 2020 continues to batter against our collective storm shutters. Spikes in COVID cases. RBG’s passing. Mitch McConnell’s very existence. Dwindling Netflix content. E-learning. Kindergarten Zoom. Need I go on?

                The hard truth is that 2020 is the inevitable human hangover after decades of getting drunk on fossil fuels, deforestation, and capital greed. Here in the States, we slashed funding for public health, marginalized our working class, and overdosed on complacency. The end result is penance—for allowing our country to plummet to such a dire place that we elected an egotistical real-estate mogul with a spray tan to lead our democracy.

                This year is America’s Walk of Shame. 2020 is hindsight.

                To me, the current landscape is reminiscent of the aftermath of a party.

                We feel only depletion as we survey the apocalyptic remnants of last night’s rager: Deflated balloons, once buoyant and perky, now cower on the carpet in shrunken impotence. Abandoned cups litter the floor—those still containing backwashed punch or flat beer are drained of effervescence. Ceramic serving bowls, caked with dried bean-dip and browned guacamole, teeter off countertops. Partygoers are passed out on ratty futons and pool tables, emitting sour-breath snores. The entire house smells faintly of urine and you realize, head drooping in despondency, that someone has pissed in the corner. It was fun while it lasted, but the clean-up, the consequence of our blind arrogance, hardly seems worth it.  

                Given the party metaphor, I should disclose, however begrudgingly, that I’m about to turn forty. Later this week, in fact. So many of us have passed significant milestones this year in virtual isolation: anniversaries, graduations, weddings, funerals. I am striving to view this birthday as an honor rather than another chalky, horse pill to swallow—another proverbial nail in 2020’s coffin. I am trying not to dwell on the fact that I had planned to be sipping a boozy cocktail on a Phuket postcard-beach, sucking the life out of some poor pineapple garnish, when instead my birthday seems destined to be commemorated by lukewarm pizza.

                But I keep reminding myself . . . not everyone gets the banal “Over the Hill” Hallmark card.

                Age is a gift.

                40 is such a nice round number. So many divisors. Which really just means—it’s high up there. I’m very likely approaching the back nine. Or, at the very least, aligning my putt on the eighth green, scanning the approaching hill for the refreshment cart. Perhaps for a Hint water.

                Things are starting to fall apart. I have hip pain. From sleeping! A month ago, I bought a bladder support device for playing sports and an orthopedic pillow. On the SAME day. My Amazon ads have never recovered. Sorry if that’s TMI; I sometimes grapple with boundaries. (Still, the pelvic floor really should be granted more air time—the struggle is real.) I’m also scheduled for a surgical procedure next month to remove something that is very likely benign. All in all, my body is burping up tiny, little SOSes.

                Embracing forty feels surreal and strange because I have a distinct memory of the morning I woke up on my own mother’s fortieth. I was nine and our front yard was littered with forty pink, swine yard stakes that my uncle had ordered in attempt to one-up my mom in their perpetual porcine tug-of-war.

                “Lordy, Lordy, Jan is Forty” the sign read, stabbed into our grass in the shape of a cut-out cardboard pig.

                Lordy, Lordy, indeed, I thought, my flannel pajama pants tucked into my socks. 40 is OLD.

                I reject that notion now. 80 is old. 80 has even more divisors.

                Yesterday I was driving in the car, listening to the Jimmy Buffett song, Trip Around the Sun.

                It dawned on me that while I haven’t boarded any airplanes lately, I have been traveling. We all have. The earth is still propelling forward despite the lockdowns and stillness, amidst the groundings and closing of borders. Life exists, even persists, under such a catatonic trance. My passport may be laying inert in my desk drawer, but I’m in perpetual motion, orbiting that great big star.  

                “This year gone by ain’t been a piece of cake….

                I’m just hangin’ on while this old world keeps spinning

                And it’s good to know it’s out of my control…

               Just enjoy this ride on my trip around the sun.”

                2020 has granted me a few souvenirs. I finished writing the first draft of a historical novel. I watched my one kid learn how to ride her two-wheeler and the other master the doggy paddle. I reconnected with many friends. I lost myself in a boatload of amazing books. I walked almost every day. I even found 12-packs of Hint water on sale at Costco.

                It’s not the ride I planned for, nor am I certain of the destination. But it’s still a journey.  

                And so far at least, I haven’t left anything behind in the seat-back pocket. Except maybe some crumbled Kleenex.

My Uninvited Houseguest

The pandemic delivered a houseguest. I know, not the ideal time to add to our brood, but I don’t think I have much of a choice. The girl, woman actually—I’m still getting used to how much she has aged—who has been staying with us these past two months seems keen on extending her stay. She hasn’t confessed it out loud to me yet, but I can tell. She’s getting too comfortable, playing UNO with my kids, falling asleep on the La-Z-Boy couch, adding items to the grocery list. The other night at two a.m. I caught her watching season one of Homeland.

I am slowly acclimating to having another person around, her oddness and unnerving ability to just show up in the middle of a family meal or half-way through an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos. Granted, she is not the most courteous interloper. She can be irritable, morose, withdrawn, and downright rude. I am endeavoring to tolerate her, to accept all of her idiosyncrasies. But sometimes she scares me, the way she looks at me in the shadows when the rest of the house is asleep. We stare at each other on either side of the coffee table like some kind of dark, perverse blinking contest. I’m convinced she derives some kind of sick pleasure out of watching me cry or hovering over me in the deep of night, causing me to shudder awake, terrified of something I can’t quite articulate.

Still, there are some afternoons of peace, those portrait-perfect, 70-degree, white-washed Saturdays that make me nostalgic for my brief stint in California, when I take the kids for a walk in the woods or a bike ride and she’s nowhere to be found.

She has visited me before, in high school and during my first semester of college, and each time after my children were born. She attended both my weddings and some family funerals and camped out for a while in the summer of 2002. That year, I thought she was never going to leave.

There are times she musters the consideration to call ahead, offering only a loose estimate of arrival like some loony old great-uncle who refuses to conform to society’s method of timekeeping. Other times, she seems to revel in just showing up on my doorstep. The bell rings and I assume it’s the Amazon delivery guy with my clarifying shampoo. She’ll barge past me without a word, without a hello, her car strapped down with baggage, parked in the driveway like some overburdened turtle.

One instance, when I was twenty-eight she surprised me so completely she made me shriek in fright. She wore the sinister delight of a child jumping out of a linen closet. That time I don’t even remember opening the door for her.

She always finds me, no matter how many times I move or cross state lines. She comes regardless, in spite of, and in addition to—seeking me out with such precision, it is as though I am unintentionally alerting her, this highly receptive mosquito, with my every breath.

On this latest visit, she arrived with a new look, a questionable wardrobe which lacks a certain finesse. Her pants are all elastic, her sweaters baggy, and sometimes I’m convinced she doesn’t even bother with a bra. Her hair could use a trim and her dark roots are starting to show, but I don’t want to offend her. Glass houses and all.

Each time she appears, a familiar stone of dread settles in my gut, the way she scrutinizes me, almost pleased with herself for disrupting my life. But after she is finally gone, truly gone and not just hiding in the pantry, things begin to find rhythm again. It may be rocky for a while, but then one day I find myself pausing while sautéing zucchini or reading a Nancy Drew to my children and realize we are all in a pretty good place.

I don’t remember the goodbyes as much as I recall each of her hellos. I can usually pinpoint when she's preparing to disappear. There are fewer staring contests, confrontations and clashes. Her eyes exude more tenderness and compassion as though she herself is mourning the inevitable departure.

Last week, after losing my job at a company I’ve been with for seventeen years, I asked her to sit down with me to better assess how long she was planning on staying. I needed to be proactive and prudent about budgeting and food costs. The additional mouth to feed was getting to be a bit of a drag.

Immediately, I felt awkward. How was it that I didn’t even know this woman’s name? After all this time, all these encounters, living under my own roof?

“Look,” I said, folding my hands on my lap. “I’m not sure what to call you, but I’ve known you almost forty years now and this is the longest you’ve ever stayed. Shouldn’t you be leaving soon?”

She smiled, that prescient grin that makes me both uneasy and reassured. How does she always manage to make me feel oblivious, as if I, alone, aren’t comprehending a glaringly obvious riddle?

“Emily,” she said, mirroring me in folding her hands. “I’m pretty sure I introduced myself years ago when you were a young girl. Call me Change. But why would I leave now when we’re just beginning to get to know each other?”

Watering our Legacies

"It's time to transfer some of the plants," my grandmother dictates from her side door, dressed in a housecoat, hair pinned back.

She’s 95 next month. I am checking on her from a distance, six feet between her top stair and the walkway where I stand, my palm shielding the sun. She, a WWII survivor, is handling this better than any of us. Her basement is stocked with canned goods, jars of green tomatoes and rhubarb jam. To her, rationing is not a rehearsal. She’s persevered through worse and now has Netflix and a microwave.

“Uproot them and plant them in your own backyard,” she says again. “They’re hardy. They’ll survive." She smiles as if conceding that I did not inherit her same green thumb.

“But, then you won’t get to enjoy them. I don’t want to raid your garden. Especially now, when there’s so little joy,” I protest, sticking to our practiced script, our dialogue dance that repeats every spring just as her perennials break through the dense April dirt.

My resistance. Her insistence.

“Take the Rose of Sharon, the jasmine bush against the garage, a few of the Black-eyed Susans, maybe a peony or two.”

“Won’t you miss them?”

She waves her hand, a dismissive swipe as though sentimentality serves no purpose, lacking in grit. I glance back at her garden, the plot of land she has cared for and cultivated for the past sixty years beside the very house my grandfather built.

But then she continues, “It would be nice if you had some of them. If I knew they would outlast me. Consider it a birthday present.”

For the first time, I do as I’m told.

Later, my children watch me as I dig holes near our back deck.

We are all putting down roots, watering our legacies.

Social Distancing the Bath Toys

My mother is washing her vases. She has about three dozen of them lining the tops of her kitchen cabinets. Her best friend knows to text me if she ever goes over there and finds them cluttering the counters, waiting like SUVs queuing at the car wash to spray down with suds. We both understand what it means. It’s her signature cry for help. Stress abounds and she’s grasping for something to control. Her world may be crumbling around her, but at least the vases will be spotless. 

Me? I make soup. Something about the methodical therapy of chopping vegetables, the smell of a mirepoix simmering on the stove infuses me with a sense of domestic accomplishment and I can momentarily forget the sky is falling. Okay, that’s bullshit. Usually I rip open a bag of peanut M&Ms.  My sister purges. It’s really quite impressive, considering on an average day her house looks like something out a of Better Homes and Gardens magazine. If things get really bad, she’ll need to move onto my closets. Her sense of catharsis would be off the charts.

But, we all do it in some form or another. Bite our nails. Stress clean. Binge reality tv. Drink. I have a friend who alphabetizes her spice cabinet. Another rearranges her bedroom furniture. An old neighbor used to run a twelve-mile loop whenever she felt overwhelmed. I know, eye roll.

Two weeks ago, I was still skeptical. Maybe it’s more accurate to say I was living in cozy denial while secretly envisioning every possible apocalyptic scenario of how this pandemic was going to play out. If I accounted for it on my list of atrocious outcomes, it couldn’t possibly come true. Could it? Either way, my stash of peanut M&Ms was still unscathed.

In my almost forty years, it seems as though tragedy often delivers the strange courtesy of occurring as a surprise – that way we humans can’t perseverate on it in advance. But, something changed this week. Something shifted in me as I read the articles by epidemiologists and scientists and mathematicians, scrutinized the news updates and reflected on the charts demonstrating how social distancing can flatten the curve, easing the burden on our hospitals and medical staff and effectively, save lives. I watched the incidence numbers tick up exponentially in other countries, stared at photos of the Duomo at midday, forsaken, desolate, the only sign of life evidenced by the smattering of confused pigeons. I began to digest the reality that this microbial adversary was indeed coming, the virus—the proverbial ant that brings a giant to his knees.

In fact, it was already here.

In Illinois, the schools are now closed, my fridge is stocked, and our order of watercolor paints and Frozen II Legos arrived without delay. (Thank God for Amazon Prime.) We went house-bound t-minus 48-hours ago and we’re in it for the long haul. However, just yesterday on the evening news, I witnessed a slew of party-goers clutching beer bottles, decked out in green, beads draping from their necks, celebrating St. Patrick’s Day in mass crowds. I got angry. I thought, are these individuals so obtuse, so divested, that they truly don’t care about anyone over the age of seventy?

I hear people politicizing the outbreak, claiming that it’s a democratic hoax, propaganda being fed to a panicking public, and I’m left grappling to understand how an international health emergency came to be regarded as a partisan issue. To me it’s on par with attributing cancer to a blue state or a red state or arguing that a virus prefers a bleeding liberal over a staunch republican as its gracious host.  

I know we are all collectively grateful this virus doesn’t seem to pose a fatal threat to our children. But, I feel the need to ask the question, what if it were the youngest members of our society, our toddlers, preschoolers, and preteens dying at a rate of 3% around the globe from this pandemic? What if doctors were being forced to triage our first graders, to decide which child gets a ventilator or a hospital bed? I can pretty much guarantee Chicagoans wouldn’t be out, carousing in the streets, clanging together pints of Guinness. Don’t our mothers and nanas, our dads and grandpas, not to mention those in our society who are immunocompromised, deserve the same reverence?

My mom and I spoke on the phone this morning and before we hung up, we both agreed that it’s a blessing that my dad is no longer here. We didn’t say it to be callous, but after years of fighting to keep him alive with less than 15% heart functioning, it’s a relief not to be worried about him during this crisis. I think about all the families with elderly relatives in nursing homes and loved ones in hospitals around the globe. How terrifying it must be to live with that vulnerability every day, the fact that they have no control over an invisible threat that would be catastrophic. They must rely on the goodness, the generosity and moral obligation of strangers to socially distance, so that their beloveds may be granted a fighting chance.   

It’s true that it goes against human instinct to retract in a time of crisis, to abstain from reaching out a hand, offering a hug or seeking solace in someone’s touch. And yet, I’m buoyed by the resilience I’m seeing on local social media sites and though my calls and chats with friends. People are posting academic e-lessons and sharing ideas for safe outdoor scavenger hunts and shamrock searches.  I’ve spoken to my sister and brother more in these past few days than I did during the entire month of February.

“Let’s touch base every day,” my sister says and I hear the same innate need to connect reflected in her voice.

“Yes, 100%,” I answer. “It’s something to look forward to.” 

My husband told me the other night that he overheard our five-year-old talking to her Barbie mermaids in the bathtub. King Triton had lined up all of his daughters and was interviewing them one at a time, inquiring if any had contracted the coronavirus. One brave mermaid spoke up and admitted she had been sneezing and was bleeding from her tail. Later, as I was collecting the damp towels off the tile, I spotted the lone mermaid squatting in the corner of the tub, quarantined from the rest.

She’ll be fine though. She’s young and healthy with a two-inch waist and an enviable frock of thick magenta hair. Besides, I’m confident they have some solid Netflix programming under the sea. All this to say, if my preschooler can figure it out, please, respect the call to socially distance. As much as you can. It’s quite literally saving lives.

And if that isn’t enough of an incentive, I promise when this is nightmare is all over to visit your home and adulate you with compliments on how impossibly clean you keep your vases.