Day 66: Hunger Games

May 21, 2020: Hunger Games

Shelter In Place, San Francisco, California

I don’t know the name of this modest moth that’s visiting our garden. This one and his compatriots land on every available bloom, the more colorful the better. Not knowing whether they are friend or foe, I leave the moths alone; our borrowed cat only swats at them half-heartedly from her hiding spot in the shade. They don’t seem to be the culprits taking chunks from our heavier green-left plants, and they make good pictures feasting on the foxgloves.

Are you hungry all the time? I am. This wasn’t so at the beginning, but lately I’m famished, no matter how recently I’ve eaten. Gone are my pre-virus occasional snacks of fruits and nuts; gone is my renunciation of sugar and wheat. I start the day with English muffins (when we can get them) with lots of butter and piles of sweet jam, and move on from there. 

It’s probably no coincidence that I crave familiar comfort foods the most. The other day I actually considered making Christmas cookies now, in May, so attached was I to the prospect of tasting my great-grandmother’s ‘sand tarts’, a Southern version of a Scottish treat. I remember when I was probably three or four, she stood me on the framed heating grate, my eyes and nose just over the counter’s edge, so I could watch her mix the dough and smell the cinnamon she sprinkled on the top. I did make chocolate chip cookies a few weeks back (a once-upon-a-time special treat for my own kids during Minnesota snow storms), but my full-fledged hunger games had yet to start; the sugar was just too much for me, so I dropped off most of the batch to Jack’s kitchen crew as a special treat. I don’t dare try baking them again today. I’d eat them all, and quickly! Oreos, though, have snuck onto our shelves, a cookie I associate with family campfires. Sometimes I’d sneak an extra Oreo when my mother wasn’t looking; I do that now sometimes, when John has left the kitchen. Triscuits and Wheat Thins remind me of Dad’s evening declaration: ‘Cocktail time!’ Only occasionally have we been able to order any good cheese to go with them, but the crackers taste like home just the same. Plus, almond crackers - my new obsession - like Dad, I eat them as I wait for dinner. 

Of course, these new bad habits might be chalked up to the limited food varieties available for delivery - we take what we can get (at least that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it). Or maybe it’s boredom. But really, of course, the cravings come mostly from the accumulated stress of sixty-plus days of isolation, the worrying politics behind it, and the fear that some day there really won’t be any food at all (food scarcity, I’ve discovered, is a primal fear of mine and every time the panic hits, I donate to the food bank for those who are hungry now, for real).

How is all of this snacking affecting my weight, you ask? Are you imagining me ballooning as we speak? Up until recently, I had still kept off the pounds lost way back in ancient history (January). But lately, well, I’m guessing the battle has gone the other way. I wouldn’t know, because the batteries died in the scale last week, and I don’t care because another bag of Oreos is about to land at our front door.

Day 65: Boomers and Bloomers

Shelter in Place, San Francisco, California

From over the fence the other day, my neighbor pointed to the tea roses on our side. “I just love the Cecil Brunner roses, don’t you? They’re such classics. They don’t look so good when they open up,” he said, “but their buds are just so perfect!” It’s true. I’ve been featuring these beauties here off and on since the first one bloomed, but my neighbor reminded me to look again. Right now, we’re in a waning stage, with more spent flowers than new blooms, but soon this old and gnarled bush will grace us with a fresh crop to last us through the summer.

Last Christmas, my two sons explained patiently to me and my twelve-year-old grandson the meaning of the phrase “Okay, Boomer” - my grandson because he had used it completely inappropriately, and me because I’d never heard it before. I’ve tried to avoid all the labels awarded my generation in the various decades since my birth - baby boomers, hippies, flower children, career moms, etc. - but I admit that we probably now deserve the “okay Boomer” reprimand when we lament the lost days of our youth. Do I know where this world is going? For the life of me, I do not. Do I miss the old days? Especially in politics, I do, crazy as it seems - when folks of all persuasions were expected to tell the truth and work for their respective versions of how to serve their country rather than themselves. 

I admit that I’m feeling trepidation about the next phase of the quarantine when the rest of the world tries to reestablish some kind of ‘normal’ and us oldsters are advised to remain at home. I liked it when, as the sappiest of Covid-era advertisements claimed, we were all in this together. Now the aged among us will be even more out of the mainstream than we were before this started (and we were), with a new title hanging over our heads - ‘expendable.’ I’ve heard the word creep into the language of certain politicians and the sentiment emerge from behind the headlines. Somehow, the idea of staying home ‘to protect your grandmother’ has warped into a more cynical version of itself - it’s mostly old people dying, so what’s the big deal? I’m not going to argue the case, I’m going to tell you how it feels. Shitty. Strange. Demoralizing. I can’t say I haven’t thought from time to time about the native peoples whose elders accepted death gracefully for the good of the community. I’m not totally averse, in fact, to such a concept now - after all, at least part of the reason I stay home is to keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed with the likes of me. But I’m not convinced that those willing to let me go have the greater good in mind. 

I am hoping with all my might that those younger than me will have the foresight and courage to take the unexpected opportunity this pandemic has offered up - a chance to do things differently - maybe radically so. I don’t want the old ways back - I want our offspring to fix things in a way that my generation never could. I want new life, new buds to bloom - fairness, equality, sustainability, compassion. And if that’s possible, you can bet this particular boomer will not only stay at home, she’ll shut up, and stay completely out of the way.

Shelter in Place, Day 64: The Broader Picture

May 19, 2020, The Broader Picture

San Francisco, California

After subjecting readers to small snippets of our garden for the past 63 days, it seems only fair to provide a broader picture. This photo was taken this morning about halfway from the back of the garden to the house, just where the patio ends and the more shaded paths begin behind me. If you look closely in the upper lefthand window of the house, you will see reflected a corner of the apartment building I manage to avoid capturing in my photos, the monstrosity that looms over us and which we (mostly) manage to ignore. Sometimes it’s best to tell the whole story, from every point of view. 

I appreciate the warm response to the first two thirds of my parents’ love story during the war. We all see parallels to today - the pain, the fear, the isolation, the sacrifice, the love and yearning. In the past 24 hours, John and I have re-examined it from both my parents’ points of view, knowing what we know about who they were and how they lived their marriage. Neither of their actions, it turns out, were out of character: my dad insightful but self-absorbed, my mom fiery and self-protective.

In my family, this was always my mother’s story to tell until Alzheimers took it away from her. As she described Dad’s homecoming, he’d shrug slightly, and give us a sheepish grin. We never saw the letter itself until both of them were gone. 

“Absence does not make the heart grow fonder,” was the only line Mom quoted as she launched into the world of hurt that letter caused. Everything Dad wrote was true - she had attended college while he was fighting, enjoyed dances and parties, rode horses, celebrated holidays with family, haunted all the old haunts. But Mom had felt lonely, too, and worried about Dad and about the future that had not been settled but implied. She had volunteered as a nurse and counted the casualties among her friends and family. Most of all, Mom had waited. And just before her worries were over, he dropped the honesty bomb and then got on a ship. 

“It wasn’t a terrible thing [for him] to do,” she explained years later, “but it was hard to be on the other end. I wanted to put [our meeting] off …In the first place, I was crushed. I just sort of thought oh, my God, I’ve been writing these letters and, you know, how has he been receiving them? And then it was a question of everybody expecting him to come home, and me to rush up and all that kind of thing. And I wasn’t about to rush up,” she laughed, still defiant after all these years. 

For his part, Dad had hesitated to head directly for Mom’s school in Virginia because he thought it might imply more of a commitment than he was ready to make. Still, she was his first phone call, after waiting in a long, long line. “I was cool as a cucumber,” she said when he asked her to come north to meet him. She said no and hung up, so he counted out his change and got back in line. In the third call, she reluctantly agreed to meet him in Chester, Pennsylvania, a middle ground, close to their home town. 

By the time she snuck out of school and got a local train to Washington, Mom had missed the connection they’d agreed to, so she jumped on the next available train to Philadelphia, hoping Dad would wait. The train was standing room only - soldiers, mostly - and it wasn’t until the conductor saw her ticket that she learned the train made no stop in Chester. “We’re not even on the same track,” the conductor said, “but don’t worry,” and he left her to do just that. It was a long and anxious ride, knowing that Dad would already be waiting with no idea why she wasn’t there. Then, as it approached Chester, the train slowed down and the conductor returned to help Mom gather her belongings. “You didn’t really think we’d let you miss your young soldier, did you?” he grinned, helping her down from the train in an empty yard miles from the station. “Don’t worry. We’ll stay here until you’re safely across the tracks and have gotten over to that little grocery store across the way.”

It was nearing midnight. “Here’s this huge train,” my mother recounted, “filled with people, because there never were enough seats in those days during the war. And the whole train waited.” Picture Edward Hopper — dark night, an empty train yard, a single lighted storefront, a young girl clutching her bag, hesitating at the door. “The little conductor then waved his light at me and I waved back at him, and went in. But I still didn’t know, you know… He didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know where he was.” Inside, she managed to call the Chester station. “Is there a GI wandering around, and he has a big red 1 on his shoulder, and looking like he’s upset?” There was. “And the end of the story is,” my mother continued, “that for all our ups and downs, he got off way down at the end of the block - off a bus or something - and I was still standing in the store. And I came out the door and he started to run… And that was the end of that…. Almost,” she said and laughed.

Dad fell in love with Mom three times in his life that I know of: first, in high school when he was football captain and she was head of the cheerleading squad; second, after the war under that light by the train tracks; and, finally, when Alzheimer’s took over her life and memories - even this one. “The disease strips you down to who you truly are,” my father once told me, “and your Mother is such a good, kind person. It sounds funny to say, but I’ve fallen for her all over again.” 

And so, the broader picture today is simply this: love triumphs in the grander scheme of things. Even in war; even in pandemics. We want to understand and forgive. Or so we can always hope.

— thanks to Lauren de Moll for her meticulous research and transcriptions, and to Hans Buetow for having the foresight to interview my parents when they could still tell this story together.