Mothering in Place

“Happy Mother’s Day,” my friend Madge texted from Harrisburg this morning, three hours before I rolled out of bed. “Your kids are so lucky.”

Madge raised one lovely daughter and through the years was in constant awe of how I managed the masses. From afar, her perception was that I did pretty darn good. But, we all look good on social media and all sound great through the stories we tell.

Mothers don’t have it easy. We can’t help but compare ourselves to the bounty of perfect mothers out there. The mothers who cook dinner every single night and whose kids willingly sit around the table with them. Every. Single. Night. The mothers who spend hours finger painting, play doughing, and splashing in puddles without ever once worrying about the mess. 

There are those mothers who can do an ER run without having to call her best friend. And without saying, don’t drip your blood on the car seat. Mothers who get up in the middle of the night, at the crack of dawn, to answer a child’s cry without elbowing her spouse awake, so that he, who works 12-hour days outside of the house, will do the dirty work. Mothers who change the sheets every week, wash the towels every day, iron the wrinkles out of linen blouses. 

There are mothers out there who bestow flowers upon their daughters as they finish their cheerleading routines, buy lawn signs praising their graduates (back when kids actually graduated), and post videos of the cute little things their cute little kids said or did, or didn’t do. 

There are mothers who are fiercely protective, brag incessantly, and announce to the world that their kids are the strongest, smartest, and best human beings ever born. Mothers who make decisions with confidence and embrace their children’s decisions with calm. 

And, yes, there are mothers who have never, ever thought, let alone said out loud, the F word in conjunction with, or as an adjective to one of their children's names. 

I hear from many of those mothers on Mother’s Day. Bonnie and Angela and Claire and Theresa and Tracy and Karen (even though I always yell at her for sending wishes in a chain with 30 other mothers included). Texts go round and round to all the mothers in the UNC gang, the college girls, the church ladies. I get texts from Heather and Susan and Janice and Betty and Ann and Holly and Kathy. It’s a lot for someone who doesn’t even believe in the “holiday.”  

But, it’s messages from the kids who I’ve duped along the way that tug at my heart strings. The Oliva and Harleys, the Diana's, the Chris Joneses and Koree’s (I know it’s coming), the Mike Chiaradio’s. 

Every single year since I’ve known her, Liza sends me a text:  “Thank you for always being an example of a great mother.” 

I shake my head and smile, thinking please, please, don’t follow my example with Penelope, the most perfect two year-old ever. 

And Tanya, who was there when I woke up from my mastectomy, who visited me after I had my knees replaced, “Thanks for being an outstanding mother and giving me my sisters Max and Molly and brother Leo.” I’m thinking that typo was a dig at Max. 

I hear from Heather, the daughter’s oldest, bestest friend, who won me over twenty years ago and will be at the top of my list for the next twenty. Or forty, if I live that long. 

I always say that I had the perfect mother. The one who never meddled. The one who never yelled. The one who loved every single minute of being a mother. And still does. I’ll zoom with her later and she’ll pooh-pooh the praise and lament over all the things she thinks she did wrong.

But, perception is reality. 

And while I will continue to encourage my children to shelter in place, as long as it’s not my place, I will always and forever feel their pain, their joy, their heartbreaks, their hopes, their fails, their fun, and most of all, their love. 

Because apparently, I’ve duped them, too. 

Nothing to be Stressed About

“Hope things are less stressful for you,” my friend Ann texted from Nags Head.

“Stressful? What would I have to be stressed about?” I snapped back. 

Ann is someone I keep in touch with regularly in real life, but as is the case with so many other friends, our correspondences have escalated with the coronavirus. We share uplifting quotes and poems by email, send humorous memes back and forth by text, and expose our graying roots on Zoom calls.  

Ann knows stress. She counts on income from her beach house rental that may or may not happen this year. She’s a high school teacher trying to keep her students engaged and her seniors from falling apart. Oh, and her beloved brother is battling metastatic melanoma. In the brain. In the middle of a pandemic. 

That's stress. 

I'm not one of my many friends who are nursing heartbreaks as their sons and daughters postpone their weddings. Or toggling back and forth, wondering if September will be safe, and if it is, will it mean wearing masks and distant dancing? I'm not the mother of a high school senior who is missing his final year of baseball. The year he was going to win major accolades. I don't have a kid, who after all that preparation, is deprived of the big blowout bar mitzvah party after stumbling through his Torah portion. I don't have a daughter who thought she was coming home from school for a week or two. But, surprise! her college days are done. 

We were able to celebrate my sister's 60th birthday in early February and if we can't get together for my mother's 95th in October, well, we'll do it when she turns 96. I'm not a health care worker. I'm not a first responder. I'm not a small business owner. 

I have absolutely no stress. 

I’m used to working from home. The only difference now is that I have no work. I’m used to spending hours a day exercising. The only difference is now I’m double downing on my walks. I’m used to eating the same thing every day, depending on which diet plan I'm following. The only difference is now I'm following two diet plans which means I'm eating twice as much. I’m used to book clubs and writer’s groups and church meetings and get- togethers with friends. The only difference is I don't have to chop the vegetables and buy the hummus, because we now have an online host. 

What is different is when we do our check-ins, way more often than ever before, we end up spending 7/8ths of our conversation exchanging war stories. 

My little town of Teaneck, by no fault of its own, has been hugging the headlines for weeks. Sadly, it is the epicenter of Bergen County which is the epicenter of New Jersey which is an epicenter away from New York City. And, we all know what’s going on there. 

My friends are scattered across the country, some in big cities, some in sprawling suburbs, some in tiny towns. Some live in harder-hit areas, and some still aren't wearing masks to  grocery stores. And, while some of them know a friend of a friend who has gotten “it,” most of them don't have a personal connection with coronavirus. 

Meanwhile, my count hovers around twenty. Twenty people I know who have tested positive. I'm not talking about great aunts of former school teachers. Or NBA players I've watched on television. These are people I actually know. People I socialize with. People I like. People I love.

On top of the confirmed cases are a dozen or more who were or are presumed positive by virtue of their symptoms and/or proximity. Then, of course there are the many in denial who claim their coughs and fevers and loss of taste and smell are no more than spring allergies. In an eight-block radius of my gridded neighborhood, I know eight people who tested positive. I know four people who have died. Five more who are parents of friends.

  

I talk with Ann and Kathy and Holly every few days and we banter back and forth about what is right and what is wrong. Should we shed our clothes and take a shower after food shopping? Is it safer to go to Stop & Shop in Teaneck or Cafasso’s in Fort Lee? Can our adult children come from Queens and Brooklyn for Easter dinner? Is it OK to go mask-less when we’re out walking if we cross the street when someone comes close? Should we wipe down packages when they come from Amazon?  We talk about what stores provide gloves and which ones have no lines. Two of us express shock that the other two don’t use Scott toilet paper. All four of us lament the shortage. We share pictures of masks that we’ve made or, in my case, had made for us. We do yoga. Sometimes. If I'm awake at the appointed hour. 

And we can’t help but wonder what in the world we talked about before the world went haywire.

The other day I told them about the heart-wrenching Zoom funeral I attended that afternoon. Phil went into the hospital in mid-March and never came out. He died intubated and alone and the service honoring his life was limited to a few family members with the rest of us watching on our iPads and laptops.

Our Zoom call completed, I turned on Trump's daily press briefing in which he announced that states could start opening up.

Later, I went for something a little lighter and watched The Bachelor: Listen to your Heart, (thanks to Taryn for getting me hooked on something I had successfully avoided for all those years). There was a lot of touching, a lot of tongue kissing, and a lot of crowded spaces. I cringed, despite knowing that it was taped months ago. 

At that point, my ever-loving spouse summoned me into the kitchen for a backgammon tournament. 

"Are you more or less afraid of getting it now than you were in the beginning?" I asked.

"Getting what?" he responded as he knocked me off the board.

I rolled my eyes. Then rolled the dice. 

He coughed. I doubled. I won.

Game over, I turned to Rachel Maddow who was talking about Ireland and how they are handling the inordinate number of nursing home deaths versus what we are doing in our country. Then, I played a few hundred rounds of Words with Friends followed by watching Brian Williams’ The 11th Hour. He announced we were in Day 1,183 of the Trump administration, with 201 days to go until the presidential election. He reported that, while a reopening strategy had been unveiled, our death toll is somewhere north of 34,000 with some 667,000 confirmed cases out of the one percent of the nation that’s been tested. One percent. 

And then I went to bed.

I woke up the next morning with a heaviness in my chest. A slight sore throat. General malaise. Yet, I rolled out of bed, put on my sneakers, grabbed the very fashionable mask my neighbor Mona left on my door step last week. The same Mona who is, at long last, recovering from COVID-19. I headed out for my walk, taking the route with the steepest hills to test my lungs. Four miles later, after listening to earnest NPR hosts taking calls from nannies and domestic workers who have found themselves jobless and stimulus package-less, I was still breathing. I came home and mailed a check to the cleaning professional who hasn't worked for me in six years. Then, I read some of our president’s tweets which said Liberate Minnesota! Liberate Michigan! Liberate Virginia! 

And that’s when I realized, it’s only a pandemic. It’s only a divided country. It’s only a few hundred thousand people. It's all in my head. We're all going to be just fine. 

And, there’s absolutely nothing to feel stressed about.

Searching for Surgical Gloves

I’m a counter. I guess that makes me somewhat OCD (I hear you, my sisters, somewhat, you say?). I count laundry that I fold, I count minutes that I write, I count seconds that I clean, I count chores that I complete, and of course, I count calories that I consume. But, admittedly, sometimes I can’t count that high.

In the olden days when I went on my walks, I’d count my steps. Then I got an Apple watch that does it for me. So now, I count steps in my head and compare with those recorded on my watch, which are surprisingly, or maybe not, pretty darn close. When I get bored of doing that, I move on to counting how many dogs I see, how many red front doors I pass, how many people honk and wave, or how many kitchen cabinets I have left to clean out (down to three, gotta ration them). 

Yesterday, to preserve a modicum of sanity, I took a break from the Cuomo press briefings and COVID-19 news conferences and call-in radio with idiots asking why, if baseball is played outside, they can’t just open up CitiField if we promise to keep our distance from one another. Instead, I listened on my old-school Sony Walkman with the old-fashioned headset to a classic soul show on public radio. As I internally bopped my way through town with Al Green and Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, I came across something completely new to count. 

In a three-and-a-half mile walk, I counted not one, not ten, but 17 surgical gloves discarded on the side of the road. Some of them were quite attractive. There were blue and purple and green gloves. There were gloves with fingers fully spread. There were gloves that looked brand-new. But, there were also some so rumbled and crumpled and torn and twisted that I had to kick them with my toe to discern whether I could add them to my count. To make sure they weren’t a newspaper bag filled with a Pomeranian’s poop. 

I don’t know about you, but 17 surgical gloves in a three-and-a-half mile radius seems like an awful lot to me. Perhaps because surgical gloves are a new household product, we just haven’t figured out their place in the world. Will they choke pigeons and puppies and lie in landfills for eternity? Do we bag them in zip locks to keep them from contaminating innocent trash collectors? Are they recyclable, flushable, reusable? 

I get that we’re all trying to figure out the risk vs reward of surgical gloves, but still can’t wrap my brain around why anyone out there thinks it’s OK to litter the streets with anything, let alone, PPE. But, then again, I still haven’t been able to grasp why so many people causally toss Corona bottles out of their car windows, leaving unsuspecting bicyclists with flat tires, twenty miles from home. 

While alternately cogitating and counting, I made another disturbing discovery. Not one single glove had a partner. It was as if the wearer had made a Sophie’s Choice – the right one stays, the left one goes. I wonder what the thought process was there. I’ll keep the left one because I wiped my nose with the right. I’ll keep the right because I touched the grocery bag with the left. Or was it the left? Can’t waste two, I’ll do eeny-meeny-miny-moe, out the window one will go. 

I’m really trying hard not to judge anyone’s actions during this time. Not the sneezer in the supermarket. Not the social non-distancer on the sidewalk. Not the families who are filling their homes with friends and lovers and sending them out in different directions for tacos. 

No one, not even the most normal among us, is being normal. 

So, instead, I’ll just keep walking. And counting crazy things. 

It’s a whole lot better than counting the days we’ve been quarantined. And, infinitely more comforting than counting the ever-growing list of friends who have fallen victim to, or died from, this unfathomably unaccountable thing called COVID-19.

Corona Can't Kill a Soul

“I know I’m somewhat biased,” Janice said a couple months ago at her nephew Ian’s wedding. “But, they are all so smart. And handsome.”

“And pretty,” I added, tipping my head toward Jenna. 

Janice smiled. “Well, that goes without saying.”  

I laughed. No one but an aunt could get away with that kind of somewhat biased remark without it being met by an eye roll, or worse.

Janice was the quintessential aunt. She had more nieces and nephews than anyone I’ve ever known. Though only seven of them were true blood relatives, half the town of Teaneck had been graced by her goodness and love. So much so, that dozens of young and old took to calling her Aunt Janice. 

Aunt Janice was a huge part of my kids’ lives. For most of their childhood, Janice lived with her brother, Larry, his wife, Claire, who was my best friend and co-dependent co-parent, and their four boys, Ian, Zack, Harrison, and Noah. The Preschels lived within screaming distance from our house and my kids and I spent an inordinate amount of time up on Prince Street.

Aunt Janice was always there. She was there for every single first-day-of-school photo opp. She was there when the kids piled off the bus in the afternoon. She was there for homework help, lifeguarding in the backyard pool, and for getting the boys to Hebrew school when no parental bribes worked. Aunt Janice cheered through countless baseball games, wrestling matches, swim meets, volleyball games, and football games. She was there in the rain. She was there in the heat. She was simply always there. 

To Aunt Janice, no swing-and-miss, no not-so-great report card grade, no fight with a friend was ever one of her nieces' or nephews' fault. There were always extenuating circumstances; a bad call, a late-night belly ache, a misinterpretation. And, that went for all of the kids she loved, not just the ones who lived inside her house.

Aunt Janice loved fiercely. I say fiercely because as kind as she was, if anyone said anything the least bit disparaging about one of her, kids – yours, mine, and ours – she would bite your head off. I know. I was bitten many times.

Aunt Janice always protected the underdog. And, for a long time, that underdog was her nephew, Noah. Noah had the ill fortune of being the youngest of Claire’s and my collective seven kids. He was still a baby when the others were toddlers. He was still a toddler when the others were little kids. He was still a little kid when the others were adolescenting and he was still an adolescent when the others were teenagers. While our kids often delighted in making Noah the odd man out, Aunt Janice swooped in. She took him under her wing and gave him extra-special attention, showering him with gifts and games and special outings. And, for some reason, it worked. Noah turned out to be perhaps the most beloved of all, despite being spoiled by his Aunt Janice. Or, more likely, because of it. 

When we’d go on group outings; to the Liberty Science Center, on the Yankees behind-the-scenes tour, to Geronimo’s after a game, Aunt Janice would always be responsible for the ones we were tired of. The wanderers, the weirdos, the whiners.

And, once her nephew, Eric, started working for the Nets, a whole new opportunity opened up for Aunt Janice. Now she was getting tickets and taking carloads full of kids to games, pumping them up with late-night sodas and snacks, because really, what’s a game without all the fixings? 

Aunt Janice was a pillar in our community. She was president of the Rotary Club, not once, not twice, but three times. She was active at her Temple. She was founding director of Teaneck’s Helping Hands Food Pantry. She was kind and giving and witty and wise. Oh, so wise.

In high school, the kids all had to put in a certain number of community service hours in order to graduate. Between playing multiple sports, and monumental socializing, those hours were just about impossible to complete. 

Aunt Janice employed our kids to help out at “her” food pantry with the promise of extra hours added to their time sheets. Word got out and dozens of surrogate nieces and nephews were suddenly interested in feeding the needy. But, Janice had an ulterior motive. Knowing that it’s impossible to help others without helping yourself, she knew she wasn’t really cheating the system with all those inflated timesheets. But rather, she was creating a whole new generation of do-gooders. 

Aunt Janice stood with unabashed pride at all six of her nephew’s bar mitzvahs, as well as at her niece’s bat mitzvah. She straightened bow ties for proms and ironed shirts for awards dinners. Aunt Janice loved to iron. She went to every graduation from Jelly Bean Nursery School’s moving up ceremony through college commencements. And, she was often present at off-year ceremonies to see an unrelated child celebrate, especially if she knew that child didn't have a huge following like hers did. 

“Who woulda thunk?” I said to Aunt Janice at Ian and Kaori's wedding back in October. The two of us surveyed the room, taking in all the friends and family members who we had spent a lifetime worrying about. We silently targeted the ones who had traveled and transformed, battled and believed, stumbled and succeeded, leapt and laughed.  

“We did good, didn’t we?” Janice said, uncharacteristically blinking back tears.

No, Janice. You. You did good. 

Janice Preschel, sister, sister-in-law, friend, and ultimate aunt, died on March 30, 2020 at age 60, from complications of COVID-19. To honor her memory, the family asks that we all take this deadly virus seriously and continue washing our hands, social distancing, doing good deeds, and helping others. Because, as Aunt Janice would say, it's just the right thing to do.

The Best of the Best Doing Their Best

Despite my many health-related incarcerations, I have only been sick, really sick, once. I was hospitalized for nearly three weeks with pancreatitis and spent seven of those days in ICU. Though it was nearly twenty years ago, it's still as vivid in my mind as yesterday's distress after binge-eating an entire bag of chocolate Easter eggs.  

I remember waking up in the middle of the night alone in a room, tubes dangling, machines whirling, TV flickering. On the screen was a bejeweled woman in a turban, a medium as it were, calling out to the spirit world as she communicated with the dead. 

After getting through that night without passing over to the other side, I remember the unsettling sense of not being able to see my children who, at the time, were nine, seven, and five years-old. I’d been having weird and fierce stomach pains for a couple of weeks and had scheduled an endoscopy to figure out what was going on. The youngest was not yet in school, so I dropped him at Claire’s house, promising I’d be home in an hour. As it ended up, I was sent by ambulance from the doctor’s office and neither he, nor my other two kids, saw me again for far too long. I didn’t necessarily miss being a short-order cook, laundress, peace-keeper, taxi driver, sports spectator, and anchor. But, my heart hurt as I felt their fear, confusion, anger, and angst. 

We all forget pain; if we didn’t, none of us would have siblings. But, certain memories simply don’t fade. Like when the twilight drugs didn’t work during my hip replacement and I laid awake through the entire surgery.

“I feel you sawing my bone. Now you’re tugging the old hip out. Now you’re stapling up the incision,” I warned the surgeon who thought it was just Betsy being Betsy, assuming I’d forget it all when it was over. Which, of course, is what should happen, if the anesthesia did what it was supposed to do. I didn’t feel any pain – it was like Novocain during a root canal. Painless, yet unpleasant. But, not scary.

Scary was being alone in the hospital with pancreatitis. Though, my ever-loving spouse visited regularly, he couldn’t spend endless hours with me. While our kids loved nothing more than hanging out with Claire and her four sons, they also needed that sense of normalcy, that old iron-fist that only a father can foster. But, that meant that I was often alone, trying to decipher the doctors’ words and deeds through my sick-hazed brain.   

One of the side effects of my pancreatitis was an abnormal amount of fluid in my lungs. I couldn’t swing my legs to the side of the bed without exhaustion. Nor I could I take ten consecutive steps without stopping to rest. Every few days a nurse would come into the room with what appeared to be a three-foot needle and stuck it in my chest, filling liter-sized jugs with beer-colored liquid. 

“Am I going to die?” I asked one of the doctors.

He responded with a firm hand on my forearm. The forearm that was finally free of the IV tubes now that they had created a port in my neck. 

Not, “Absolutely not.” Not, “Don’t be silly.” Not, “We’re not going to let that happen.” 

Just a firm hand, a grimace, and a report back to the spouse that his bride knew it was a distinct possibility. 

The spouse responded by holding my hand and telling me definitively that I was not going to die. And, that reassurance made all the difference. 

Meanwhile, back in real life, I’m often glib and snarky and dismissive when people moan and groan over their illnesses. I’m a flu shot resistor, a suck-it up mother, a this-could-be-so-much-worse kind of friend. You know, the kind of person you love to hate when you’re not feeling well. And, sometimes when you're feeling just fine. 

But, COVID-19 has removed a layer of my snark. I’m not worried about me. I can deal with whatever comes my way. But, what breaks my heart are the ever-increasing stories of people, some of whom I know, who are alone in the hospital. Whose spouses can’t visit. Whose kids can’t visit. I ache for those who have died alone, whose final farewell with loved ones was through FaceTime. Or whose last face-to-face was with a nurse with a kind smile concealed behind a surgical mask. For the new widow who is quarantined and can’t even see her adult children in her grief. For those who are wondering what that firm touch on the wrist means. If, indeed, a firm touch is even allowed through protective gear.

I continue to read my spouse's news stories. The ones about refrigerated trucks serving as mobile morgues. The ones about choosing who gets a ventilator and who dies. The ones about overtaxed health care workers. I feel horrible for the high school and college seniors, the missed proms, the postponed weddings, the canceled (gulp) cruises. 

And, I just can't stop thinking about the absurdity of it all. That this is the year 2020 and we can't do better.

In the meantime, we're doing the best we can. We're suffering through quarantines. Covering our coughs and cringing over rogue sneezes. We're washing the skin off our hands and proselytizing about what is and isn't the right thing to do. We're sanitizing and social distancing, zooming with friends and attending church on Facebook feeds. All of us waiting and wondering, hoping and praying that this too shall pass.

Then, there are those good, selfless people out there who don't have the luxury of complaining about limited grocery store hours, shortages of toilet paper, parks being closed, salons being shuttered, or mandates to work from home.  

You know the ones. The ones who really have a right to complain. The ones who are out and about doing what needs to be done. The ones we are applauding from our porches and balconies in community-wide thanks.

But, somehow saying thank you seems insufficiently superfluous right about now.

To all the fearless who are getting us through this, I don't know what else to do but to wish you Godspeed.

And to pray that when all this is over, your lives will be ever blessed with all the good the world has to give.

You are the best of the best.

Waiting for the Axe to Fall

“I feel like we're all living in that 1-5 pm window, waiting for the service person to come,” my oldest and wisest sister, Susan, said as we swapped COVID-19 stories. 

She, along with most of my family members live in Pennsylvania’s epicenter of Montgomery County and are as locked down as we are here in New Jersey's epicenter. All, including my not-so-young mother, are symptomless and somewhat sane. So far. 

Many of my friends in Teaneck have not been as lucky. 

What a perfect analogy, I thought after hanging up with her and heading to the basement to do another load of laundry. It was either that or cleaning the kitchen. 

Upon reaching the bottom step, I heard the drip, drip, double-drip of water in the bathroom. As I revved up my rage, ready to roar at the spouse and/or son for their carelessness, I flung open the shower door and lighed (a combination of laugh and sigh). For, there, on the shower floor was the unmistakable evidence of a backed up sewer line. 

The sigh was for, “Like we need this right about now?”

The laugh was for, “It could be oh, so much worse right about now.”

So, I speed-dialed the local drain scooper-outer for the second time in as many months. 

The irony that I was now waiting for an actual repair person was not lost on me.  

“Glad to be able to support my local snaker,” I said, clenching my fists in hopes that this wasn’t the big one. The one they’ve been warning us about for years. The time to replace the sewer line at a multi-thousand dollar cost one. You know, like the multi-thousand dollars our 401K lost in the last hour. 

And, again I laughed. At least we HAD, multi-thousands to lose from our 401K. Operative word, had.

Meanwhile, my hard-working spouse went senior shopping that morning. He was excited to learn that since he was now 60, he qualified for early-bird entrance at the grocery store, beginning at 6 am. He took the daughter’s car which basically sits out front anxiously awaiting her bi-monthly visits from Brooklyn. 

He wasn’t just out for mint chocolate chip ice cream; he was picking up milk and eggs for a friend in isolation following a pretty serious coronavirus stint in the hospital. In doing his good deed of the day, he scraped a curb and gashed a tire. He got out, jacked up the car and replaced the tire with a near-flat spare. 

When I finally rolled out of bed, after playing a few rounds of Words with Friends, he was well into his fourth hour of wakefulness, interviewing hospital officials for corona quotes. He muted his call and asked if I would go purchase a new tire. 

I bristled. Rather than battling back, I said I'd take care of it. After tending to my own needs. I headed off on the first of many daily walks I've taken to taking. As I listened to the radio and the latest corona counts, all I could think of was my near future and ultimate demise, sitting in a germ-filled waiting room of a big box tire store, flipping through germ-filled magazines and handing my credit card to a gloveless cashier who had just wiped her nose, then getting back into the car, touching the steering wheel before remembering that the tire guy had touched it first, presumably with his own nose-wiped hands. 

As I made the loop toward home and passed an auto repair shop on the corner, a light bulb went on. This is what he meant! My spouse hadn't intended for me to risk my life over a tire after all. I could take care of business by supporting a local small business while standing outside and practicing social distancing. And, duh. I could wipe the steering wheel with Lysol. Which, of course I could have also done at the big box tire store, but I hadn't been thinking clearly when my mind started spinning.

And so, I talked from afar to the nice, kind worker who informed me they were only open for another hour, so to hurry on home and find out the size of the tire. I texted him the info and he called back with a good news/bad news answer. Yes, they had a tire in stock, but it was $140 dollars, plus labor. I rolled my eyes, thinking that was an awful lot to spend on a car with more than 140,000 miles on it, but imagined both the joy of pleasing my spouse and of crossing something off my list of things to do while quarantined.

“It's only money,” I said, adding that I’d rather give them the business than a big tire store and that I’d send my son right over with the car.

“Do you have the receipt?” I asked, when said son returned a half-hour later. You know, trying to keep my affairs in order. Just in case. 

“There wasn’t one,” he responded, tossing me my credit card after wiping it with down an alcohol swab.

“Well, how much was the total?” I asked, somewhat exasperated. 

“Nothing. He did it for free.” 

It took me a while to wrap my brain around that one. 

“Are you sure you didn’t just walk out without paying?” I asked, never fully trusting my own offspring.

The son, the philosophy major son, struck up a conversation with the owner, and the two began commiserating over our new reality. Just a simple, "Can you believe the state of the world?" "Imagine hoarding toilet paper at a time like this." "We should all just be good people," kind of conversation.

And the owner, who shall not be named, but will get lots of future service and five-star yelp reviews, said, “We’re good” and sent my boy on his way.

Back to the sewer line. Well, the sewer line is filled with roots, as we knew, and have known. But, they were able to snake it out one more time, leaving us with a can of root-eating crystals to flush down the toilet for extra protection.

Jim, from across the street, came out to tinker with his boat-in-the-driveway as I was tinkering with the bill, trying to sign my name without touching anything. 

“Great to see some normalcy in the neighborhood,” he called, knowing that three of us on the block had given this same guy business on the same day back in January. But, with any luck, he won’t be back to visit any of us until the Corona crisis has passed and our bank accounts have begun to replenish themselves. 

In the meantime, we continue to live our lives in that service repair window, not sure if they'll show up right at one-o-clock, at five minutes to five, or if they'll come at all. We wait with anticipation to see what the cost will be. Physically, emotionally and financially. 

But, as we sit around waiting for the axe to fall, we can look out into the world and see the daffodils blooming, the trees budding, hear the robins singing and realize that it's not ALL doom and gloom. A friend is discharged from the hospital. Another's fever is gone. That sneeze you sneezed last night was nothing more than a sneeze. That cough your spouse coughed was nothing more than a cough. The local business you were trying to help flips it around and helps you instead. 

And then, right after you’ve paid that big sewer-snaking bill, that may or may not be the last one of the year, the Fed Ex guy comes bounding out of his truck and drops a box on your front porch. 

Hope springs eternal. 

It’s your Mets' season tickets. 

Safe at Sea

I’m not sure when I caught the guilt virus. But, I’m suspecting it was when I went to a wedding in my early 20s and blatantly defied the priest by taking communion as a non-Catholic. The act itself caused me no remorse, but when the couple divorced a few years later, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was all my fault. 

I question everything I do and take blame, never credit, for the way things turn out. But, I am admittedly somewhat selfish when it comes to my own personal comforts and pleasures. 

Which, is why I decided last week to forge ahead and go on my annual cruise with Patty, my bosom buddy and partner in crime. 

Patty has catastrophic anxiety. She worries about hurricanes, aging mothers, dogs in kennels, and icebergs. I have personal comfort anxiety. I worry about my hair frizzing, room temperatures, popping buttons, and my extra cup of ice. So, I figured I’d be the one calming her qualms when it came to our annual Caribbean cruise aboard the long-awaited, super-hyped, billion-dollar Celebrity Edge. The Caribbean cruise that was celebrating International Women’s Day with an all-female bridge and officer team. The Caribbean cruise with Captain Kate McCue, the first American female cruise ship captain, at the helm. I mean, how could we NOT go? 

When I left for Florida just eleven days ago, the Coronavirus was real, but still far enough removed that there wasn’t a definitive right or wrong. Besides, I’m “young” and healthy. There were no refunds being offered for frightened cruisers and as someone who hasn’t had so much as a common cold in the past seven years, I was one of those, “so what if I get the flu?” people. 

My ever-loving, non-alarmist spouse thought it was a bad idea to go, a very bad idea. 

So, after elbow-bumping him goodbye at the airport, I experienced a wave of serious guilt. In response, I did what I always do – I began verbally processing, asking every third person in the airport if I was crazy. When the skycap let me slide with an overweight 52.8 pound suitcase (extra Spanx in case we were quarantined at sea) and I asked if he would go on a cruise if he were me, he simply shrugged his shoulders and handed me my boarding pass. Along with a Deeper Life Bible Church pamphlet entitled, “Only One Life.” A message I chose to interpret as, “Go For It.” 

And, so I did.

Though I appeared outwardly confident, my insides were shaking, not sure that all the bourbon on the boat could keep the virus at bay.

“Is it safe?” I asked Marion, the Celebrity Cruise employee at our second point of entry, the first point of entry being our temperature check.  

“Absolutely!” she chirped.

“You didn’t look me in the eye when you said that!” I quipped back at her. 

She laughed and looked me full in the face and assured me that we’d be fine. 

I soon learned she was an ex-Jersey girl herself and that she had family members in both the media and the healthcare industries. Because, of course, I can’t just say “thank you,” and move on. I need backstories. 

As she ushered us onward, she unpinned a little purple ribbon (in honor of International Women’s Day) from her chest and handed it to me. 

“We’re supposed to give this to a passenger who makes a big impression on us,” she explained. 

“Oh, like the first impression rose on The Bachelor!” I said, immediately launching into Peter the Pilot’s idiocy.

At the next point of entry, Patty received her purple ribbon from Tina, a woman full of genuine glee, or perhaps, just good at faking it. Patty’s ribbon was bestowed upon her simply for putting up with me. 

And, then we walked the gangplank. There was no turning back. 

“If I don’t make it home, know that I will have died doing something I love,” I sent in the family group text half-way through my first umbrella drink. “And if I do die, know that it in no way negates how much I love all of you.”

Spoiler alert. I made it home unscathed. 

But, not without having to navigate some pretty choppy waters.

Little did we know that this would be an historical sailing, for more reasons than one. As well as being the only ship in the seas being navigated by a woman, it ended up being the only ship with a clean enough bill of health to be allowed to dock in St. Maarten. And, it ended up being the last ship to sail before Corona put the kibosh on cruising.

With public relations being ultra-important in a crisis, we couldn’t get a straight answer on how many were on board, though common consent was that it was about 2/3rds full. Our perception of those projected stats shilly-shallied from being proud to be amongst 2,000 people brave enough to not back out, to being embarrassed to be amongst 2,000 people too stupid not to back out. 

But, regardless of the conditions, on a cruise ship, the show must go on. And, so it did. 

For the first few days, the weather at sea mirrored the turbulence on land. Much too gray and cool and windy to go outside, people were ever-connected to their phones, sharing stock market horror stories and counting confirmed COVID-19 cases. March Madness was going to be played without spectators.The MLB was delaying Opening Day by two weeks. Cruise ships were offering refunds for future sailings. And then, wham. NBA season canceled. NCAA canceled. NHL canceled. Broadway went dark. Amtrak service cut. Schools closed. Restaurants closed. Malls closed. Europe closed. 

Friends were emailing like mad, sending news stories and speculations and concern. Each and every one of them signed with the unspoken, “You are absolutely crazy to have gone on that cruise.”

Call it luck. Call it fate. Call it Captain Kate. But, our ship didn’t have a single passenger or a single crew member with a single symptom. And even after we knew that no ships would be sailing for a long, long time, the crew never stopped smiling, even though their futures were so uncertain. Where would they go? What would they do? How could they survive financially? As it turned out, the ship is anchored somewhere out there and the crew remains, with pay, on board. And Captain Kate, bless her soul, announced just yesterday that while in limbo, the 1,300 crew members would get to cruise like guests, moving from below deck to balcony staterooms. 

Though I have no doubt that Captain Kate was holding her breath through every rogue wave and breaking news story last week, her sense of calm and sense of humor made for smooth sailing for both cast and crew.

I wouldn't have traded that trip for a thousand medical masks. 

When random people are thrown together in crisis, confusion, or downright chaos, they are always rewarded with a life-long bond. Together, as new friends, we weathered the storm, all the while knowing we had our own new realities and worries waiting at home. Wayne and Brian unsure of their immediate futures, both in different branches of the travel industry. Bob and Sharon thinking about their daughter and three grandchildren in Seattle; their son-in-law, a medical professional in the epicenter of the pandemic. Don wondering if he'd get clearance to go back to work or if his two little Fidos would be his sole companions for weeks on end. Patty lamenting not being able to visit her 92 year-old mother in her senior living residence. Kit knowing her family trip to Las Vegas was canceled; her son away at a college not yet closed. Chris and Les realizing they'll be sniping at each other as they work from home for God knows how long, but knowing they have stockpiles of hand sanitizer. And plenty of new colorful bowls and spoons. And, though I can't see my 94 year-old mother or my California kid for awhile, and have only seen the daughter on FaceTime, get to spend all my days and nights with my youngest kid, the dang dog who's never gotten more walks in his life, and my ever-loving journalist of a spouse who keeps me informed of all things Corona.  

Every single person on board was worried. About the health of their loved ones. The health of their 401K plans. And the health of the world we were sailing back into. 

But, together, living on the Edge, we put aside what was yet to come. We had dinners together. We went to shows together. We lost money in the casino together. We laughed at the Eden performers together. We walked through old San Juan together. We had cocktails together. Lots of cocktails together. 

And when it all came to an end, we broke the rules. After all that we'd shared - the angst, the alcohol, the calories, the conversation, the fear, the fun, our hopes, our hearts - we hugged each other tight. 

And then we washed our hands and came home.