A Time of Living Cautiously
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The Maddela Family (Photo courtesy of Anthony Maddela)
My son Gregory's charter school is holding classes online. This crisis might accelerate the development of online high school the same way it's proving to some business owners that costly leases can be avoided through teleworking. In these early stages of online curriculum, Gregory's teachers tend to shrink a one-hour class to 15 minutes, partially devoted to roll call. He is watching his classes on his gaming laptop. As soon as class breaks, he can switch back to Minecraft. I'm definitely an enabler for paying for the game apps and stocking his room with Chewy Chips Ahoy cookies and Arizona tea. But it's dangerous outside. Susan and I shouldn't be delighted to take him to empty parking lots after school to skate with friends. There's good reason why Rec and Parks closed down all City skate parks.
Greg should not be skating with buddies in Venice. His hoodie hides a splint for a fractured wrist. (Photo by Anthony Maddela)
About a month ago, I went to my doctor's office because of a persistent cough that subsequently wasn't attributed to Covid-19. The front desk handed me a mask and sent me to an examination room. When the doctor came in and saw me with the mask, she said, "Toss it out. We're all going to get coronavirus." And that was my first professional assessment of Covid-19 before the World Health Organization labeled it a pandemic.
I work in the Watts Los Angeles housing projects for the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles. HACLA is the only public housing authority in the nation with a WorkSource Center (aka America's Job Center). The City funds the center located in the Imperial Courts housing development through grants I wrote in 2013 and 2018. Despite the "shelter in place" guidance from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, the Economic and Workforce Development Department wants its 16 WorkSource Centers to remain open for public access to computers for job searches. For its part, HACLA wants the computers available for public housing residents to complete their Census forms.
The WorkSource Center (Photo by Anthony Maddela)
My coworkers and I come into the office three days a week. I suspect the risk:reward ratio is dangerously large. With so many people losing their jobs, we have to make sacrifices. It's a privilege to help people in need. That's my mantra every time I share the phone with a client and don't have the audacity to wipe it in front of her before I restore it to the cradle. I always remember to disinfect the phone once the client leaves the building.
Covid-19 hasn't just given us a break from propriety. The pandemic has reduced traffic. Personally, better environmental conditions brought out a colorful warbler I had never before seen in my neighborhood and haven't yet identified. This isn't mundane stuff that desperate circumstances render interesting. I went running this Sunday morning at a time I would normally be at Mass. Even with a heightened sense of awareness, things were pretty much the same as the last time I ran around the Brentwood Country Club golf course. Fences keep the public out of private golf courses, but we can run along these class barriers for a decent workout. While I run I think about ways to avoid contamination.
A warbler up in the trees (Photo by Anthony Maddela)
1) Push the crosswalk button with your knee. Related tip: If your yoga routine includes a shoulder stand, do not under any circumstances touch your knee to your face.
2) Pick a path that isn't near water fountains since exhaustion can cloud judgment. It's easy to fall back on routines that are no longer safe. Placing lips close to the tap poses an infection risk.
3) Run counterclockwise around the block since I have observed that most folks run clockwise. It's dangerous to amble along with a group of nice strangers who run at your pace.
The author after a run (Photo courtesy of Anthony Maddela)
I wish I had more to say on the subject of exercising in a pandemic. A few weeks ago, I gave friends yellow glow-in-the-dark vests for running between dusk and dawn. They have since become useless with so few cars on the road. The ongoing public health crisis presents this concept of life standing still while time keeps ticking. We shrink our infection probability by emulating a department store mannequin: Do nothing and go nowhere. Running allows us to safely go outside to attain peak health to lengthen our descent to croaking, which isn't inevitable. Another healthy habit is to shave every day because facial hair expands surface area for germs to amass. So many aspects of life can be tweaked to outsmart the virus. Inventing little preventative measures makes these scary times pass faster.
Here's a case of panic-buying meets panic-monitoring: While shopping in the frozen foods aisle at Whole Foods this morning, I felt sweat on my brow. I checked my temperature as soon as I returned home. We're told 100 degrees Fahrenheit or higher indicates Covid-19. The thermometer beeped at 97.5 degrees. That's cold but normal.
The “hot” item during panic-buying (Photo by Anthony Maddela)
A hundred sixty-five million years from now, six-foot crows may be studying our Cenozoic period the same way we look at the dinosaurs in the Jurassic. Crows are members of the Corvid family, which sounds eerily like Covid. To feed the Goth in you, one morbid way to spend your unexpected free time is to list what human artifacts from 2020 would be exhibited in a post-human museum of natural history. Not to suggest that Covid-19 is our meteor that turned the Earth dark.
Country & Western singer Kenny Rogers passed away recently. His family attributed it to "natural causes" probably to allay fears that he succumbed to coronavirus (who's to say that a virus that evolved in the wild is unnatural?). His hit, "Gambler" is engraved in my memory, especially the juicily cynical lyric: "The best that we can hope for is to die in our sleep." True, a morphine-induced fade is nicer than struggling for your last breath in the ICU. Opiate addiction epidemic couldn't move the needle toward fatalism. Right now, Corvid-19 has given fatalism the upper hand against optimism, but we will prevail before long. Young Judy Garland gave us this assurance in "Meet Me in St. Louis":
"Someday soon we all will be together (closer than 6 feet)
If the fates allow
Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now."
We can replace Christmas with Easter.
Anthony Maddela
Anthony Maddela lives with his family of four and writes all he can in Los Angeles.
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