Three Years, Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 79

 

Well, here we are three years after the world changed. With every update I do (and here are a few), covid impacts our everyday life less and less, though of course, it’s still with us. As of Sunday, the death toll in the U.S. is up to 1,119,000 (it’s almost seven million worldwide) and 2,000 Americans a week are still dying from it. The death rate has been very stable for over a year. Does that mean it’s endemic now? Apparently not, but it’s trending in that direction.

Falling Sick

The diminishing presence of the idea of covid in our lives makes it a little ironic that it was in this tail end (fingers crossed) phase that we actually got covid. North, Beth, and I all had covid in November—two years, eight months into the pandemic. You can read about that here and here if you missed it. North had it first, testing positive two days before Thanksgiving. We all had mild cases, though North’s was the worst, about like having the flu. Mine was like a cold and not even a bad one. We had a trip planned to Rehoboth for Thanksgiving and we went anyway, keeping to ourselves in the rental house, cooking, ordering takeout, and taking walks on the beach and boardwalk. Beth and I didn’t test positive until the day after we got home.

Traveling Further

Even though we got sick, in the past six months, our world has opened up considerably. We’ve traveled more widely than any time since the Before Times. Noah spent the fall semester in Australia, and I spent a week in Oregon while my mom was recovering from knee surgery in September. It was the first time flying since covid for both of us.

And there’s more travel on the horizon. Noah is looking for an internship in Los Angeles and he’s bought an airline ticket for three days after he graduates in late May. (A one-way ticket! I don’t even want to think about the implications of that.) North and I will be visiting family in California and Oregon in early July and Beth will be heading to Saint Louis for a convention while we’re gone.

Continuing Precautions

We still take precautions, though. We’ve all gotten the bivalent booster (Beth and North in September, me in November, and Noah in January). We test when we feel ill, and when required, though that doesn’t seem to happen as much as it used to earlier.

Of the four of us, Beth is the strictest about masking, as she always wears K95s in public buildings, whereas North and I often wear cloth or surgical masks. North still masks at school every day, one of a shrinking minority. Noah doesn’t mask at school, but he did when we went to the play last Saturday.

At the beginning of the winter, I started wondering when I would stop masking, but since there were big spikes the past two Januarys, it seemed prudent to wait until the end of the winter and see if it happened again this year. Well, it’s mid-March now and there hasn’t been a spike, so I’m thinking more seriously about it. I still notice when people are masked when they’re not and it can affect my behavior. Here are some examples. In this one I was trying to decide whether to go to book club shortly after having covid:

12/4

The average age of members is probably around seventy and some of them are in their eighties and frail, plus masking in the group has gone from almost universal to about fifty percent, just in the past few months. It didn’t seem responsible to go, so I stayed home.

The last time I went to book club, last week, I was the only one in the room wearing a mask.

Here I was picking Noah up at the airport:

12/23

We had some trouble finding the driver and when we did connect, the driver was irritated with me and rude and accused me of wasting his time. Then in the car when I cracked the window because he was unmasked, he rolled it back up. Also, he was vaping the whole time. It was the first time in my many times in a Lyft I didn’t tip the driver…

Speaking of tipping, when I get takeout coffee, I am still more likely to tip a masked barista than an unmasked one. And speaking of restaurants, eating inside them is another tough call. We don’t in general, though we make occasional exceptions, as you know from my last post. Here’s the dilemma: Right after we let North eat in a diner with friends in November, they brought home covid. Then when North ate in a café with friends in February one of the friends got covid, although they didn’t. It can be hard to balance caution with letting them have a more normal teenage social life. North’s birthday party is going to be in a restaurant that’s usually crowded but if the weather’s nice, we’ll have it outside.

Experiencing Normalcy

One time I especially appreciated not being in the grip of the worst days of the pandemic anymore was when Xander died in October. He got to die at home and had a much more peaceful passage than his brother.

10/17/22

When Xander’s brother Matthew was paralyzed by advanced heart disease three months into the pandemic, he was euthanized in the parking garage of the animal hospital and only one of us was allowed to be with him. This was much nicer and more peaceful. We were all petting Xander and talking to him, and he wasn’t scared. The vet was gentle and respectful. It’s some small comfort that his end was quick enough that he didn’t suffer much but not so sudden we didn’t get a chance to say a proper goodbye.

This used to happen more often, but occasionally something still happens for the first time since Before. The biggest one in the past six months for me is that I am back to swimming weekly.

1/31/23

I went swimming on Saturday afternoon at the pool where I used to swim weekly before it shut down first for the pandemic, then for extensive repairs. It re-opened in late November, but between being out of the habit, being salty about the fact that they were not honoring pre-pandemic punch cards, and the pool’s erratic schedule (it’s always been prone to unannounced closures and still is), I didn’t manage to show up at a time it was open until this weekend.

2/15/23

You may recall I finally got the Piney Branch pool to agree to honor my pre-pandemic punch card, but I wasn’t sure it would actually work until I successfully used it on the first Saturday in February. I am pleased about this, as I had $25 worth of swims left on the pass. It should last me the rest of the month and a week into March if I go every weekend. I’ve been swimming three Saturdays in a row now and it’s nice to be doing it again after an almost three-year-long break.

Turns out my pass lasted a little longer than that because in late February the boiler broke and the pool was closed for a week, but it opened again the first Saturday in March, and I used up the pass last weekend.

Another normal thing that happened at North’s school was that the Winter One Acts were put on… in winter.

1/18/23

It felt novel for the winter one acts to be put on in winter, as last year a covid surge and subsequent scheduling problems delayed them until May and the year before, of course, they didn’t happen at all, as school was closed for most of the year and there were no extracurriculars even when it opened briefly in the spring.

Questioning Normalcy

Sometimes it can be hard to know if things that didn’t happen did not happen because of covid or some other reason, as when I was trying to figure out whether there would be a Visitation Day at North’s school in on Columbus Day, like there used to be at every other MCPS school my kids have attended. (The answer was no.)

10/20/22

That made me think, okay, maybe this school has never done this, and it wasn’t a casualty of covid until another senior parent posted, no, visitation day did happen the last year before covid, so now I don’t know what to think about the past or the future, but it didn’t happen this year.

And it can also be hard to know if covid has caused things. At one point, I thought the leg cramps I started experiencing in late November could be an after-effect of covid.

12/11/22

We got back home just in time for me to attend a virtual meeting with my own health care provider about some mysterious leg cramps and pain I’d been experiencing. It had been worst while we were at the beach and right after and seemed to be resolving by the time I saw her, but I kept the appointment to talk about what to do if it comes back. I’m wondering now if it had something to do with having covid, because of the timing.

I do still have hints of them, mostly in the car, but they are much improved since I started taking magnesium for them, so I don’t question their origin as much.

Imagining Other Pandemics

In 2020 and 2021 I read a lot of books about real and fictional pandemics—the plague mostly, but also polio and the flu. By 2022, I guess I was over it and didn’t feel the urge to read any more. (Or maybe I just switched to pandemics on screen. Noah and I watched Station Eleven during his spring break last year and over the summer we watched the first couple seasons of The Strain. Earlier, in 2020, we watched Counterpart.)

My interest in reading about pandemics was piqued again as the third anniversary of covid approached. In February I read Hamnet and Love in the Time of Cholera (which has less to do with cholera than I expected) and I’m currently reading Sea of Tranquility. I don’t know if I’m finished with this particular obsession or not. Time will tell.

As for depictions of this pandemic, we only recently got up to the part of Blackish that portrays it.

1/18/23

[W]e got to the midpoint of season 7 of Blackish. We’ve reached the covid era episodes and while the first couple about it were excellent and very evocative, I was disappointed that it basically fell out of the plot after that, as if it barely happened and didn’t deeply alter our lives for years.

We’re still in season 7, up to the episodes aired in February 2021, and it continues to surprise me how the characters seem to be living in a parallel universe in which it’s not pre-vaccine (for most people) covid times.

How does covid still affect your day-to-day life? Or does it?

All The Very Best Cat Things

On Wednesday morning I was leaving for a walk, and I texted Beth: “Xander came out with me and seems happy in the sun so I’m not putting him back inside. Could you check on him in a half hour or so? He’s currently in the front yard sidewalk.”

We’d been having a warm, sunny week after a long stretch of rain earlier in the month and I was thinking since it might be too chilly for sunbathing soon, I wanted him to enjoy this opportunity. I’m glad I left him out there because as it turned out, it would be his last time soaking up the sun.

That afternoon I was at my desk working and Beth was on a call when I heard him make loud and distressed noise. I went to see what was wrong and he was vomiting in the hall, which was nothing unusual. But when he was done, his breathing was labored. We’d noticed he’d been breathing more heavily recently, but this was different. Beth called our regular vet practice to see if they could see him that day and they said no, so we called the animal hospital and they said to bring him.

We drove to the hospital and sat in the waiting room for a while he was examined. A vet took us into an office to talk. She said he had a mass in his throat, probably cancer, that was making it hard for him to breathe. She speculated that when he vomited, it caused it to shift into a more obstructive position. We opted against surgery because of his age (nineteen and a half) and frailty. Xander used to be a very big cat, big in all the ways possible for a cat to be—big boned, muscular, plump, and fluffy. He was once capable of staring down small dogs. But he was down to less than half his peak weight and he’d lost three pounds in the past year alone.

The vet wanted to keep him on oxygen overnight and see if steroids would reduce inflammation enough so that he could breathe unassisted. She asked if we’d like to give a DNR order for him, which was startling, but we said yes. I couldn’t imagine someone doing CPR on his fragile body. I also learned in this visit that CPR rarely works on cats anyway.

By Thursday morning the steroids had worked well enough that he was breathing better, enough to come home for however much time he had left. He spent most of the day resting more or less comfortably, though we did notice he didn’t seem to want to put his head down and he’d doze half lying down, half sitting up. We suspected he couldn’t breathe well enough when his head was down. He drank and peed in the litterbox, but he didn’t eat all day, not even the cat treats he loved, and he hadn’t eaten for most of the day before either. We all spent a lot of time petting him and telling him what a good cat he was.

We let him sleep in our bed that night, between us. It was kind of like co-sleeping with a toddler because he couldn’t get comfortable and was quite restless. He was also behaving strangely. He kept going into the bathroom, hopping up a stool, and putting his paws in the toilet, which he’d never done before. If he was thirsty, his water dish in the kitchen was more accessible than that, but I wondered if he was getting confused and had forgotten where it was.

On Friday morning, we decided it was time. The vet from the animal hospital had referred us to a company that will come to your house and euthanize your pet. A vet came soon after we called. We all sat on the living room couch with Xander between me and North. We’d given North the choice to say their goodbyes and leave the room or stay and they chose to stay.

When Xander’s brother Matthew was paralyzed by advanced heart disease three months into the pandemic, he was euthanized in the parking garage of the animal hospital and only one of us was allowed to be with him. This was much nicer and more peaceful. We were all petting Xander and talking to him, and he wasn’t scared. The vet was gentle and respectful. It’s some small comfort that his end was quick enough that he didn’t suffer much but not so sudden we didn’t get a chance to say a proper goodbye.

On Saturday a bouquet of roses and other flowers arrived. It was from some of Beth’s colleagues, who had often seen Xander in the background of Beth’s Zoom calls over the past two and a half years. He was a friendly cat who charmed anyone he encountered—North’s friends all loved him—and this was proof his charm extended to online appearances.

RIP Alexander Fionn
Circa February 14, 2003-October 14, 2022

Xander was a beautiful, good-natured cat who lived a long, happy life. In his later years, he went partially deaf and, in his determination to be heard, he just meowed louder and louder. When I posted an album of pictures of him on Facebook, mostly of him snuggling with various members of the family or sitting on diverse perches (a pile of clean, folded towels, my open laptop, an air conditioner), one of my friends commented that it looked like he’d done “all the very best cat things.” He really did. We all miss him terribly.

p.s. If you weren’t reading this blog in 2013, I recommend this post about the time Xander went missing for several days and where we found him. There’s a good twist at the end.

For Our Lives: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 74

It was potentially quite a busy weekend. North had a lot on their social calendar and there was a March for Our Lives rally in response to the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde on Saturday afternoon and it was Pride all weekend. In DC, there was a parade on Saturday and the street festival was Sunday, plus our little town was having its first-ever Pride festival on Sunday.

Beth, Noah, and I were all going to the rally and Beth, North, and I were all considering going to some Pride activity, but at the beginning of the weekend we hadn’t decided which one(s).

Friday: Prelude

North’s friend Ranvita came over for our weekly pizza-and-movie night. Over pizza and mozzarella knots, North and Ranvita talked about the dialogue they needed to perform for their theater class the next week and whether or not they were going try to get off book. (Apparently, there was an option not to, but you couldn’t get an A on the assignment if you chose not to memorize the lines.)

Beth was working late, so it was just Noah, the two high schoolers, and me. We didn’t want Beth to miss one of the movies we’d communally selected to watch together as a family so we needed to pick a new one. We have a complex nomination-and-veto system for choosing movies and having to pick a new one that four people could agree on made me reflect on the genius of having an orderly system because picking a movie four people can agree on is hard. Well, it was really just three people because I think Ranvita was a little overwhelmed by us and she kept quiet. It was mostly North putting ideas out there and me rejecting them because they were unrated and it was too hard to know what objectionable content they might contain or Noah rejecting them because their Rotten Tomatoes score was too low.

Finally, we settled on one of Noah’s choices, Perfect Blue, an amine thriller that was rated 16+ on Common Sense Media. By this point, we’d spent so much time trying to decide on a movie that I didn’t look carefully at the details of the reviews and if I had, we might not have watched it with North’s friend who’s a year younger than they are and whose parents I don’t know at all. I liked it—it was very twisty and played with reality, fiction, dreams and hallucinations in an interesting, artsy way—but it was also quite violent and sexually explicit and some of the violence was sexual. But I do tend to be stricter about media than most of North’s friends’ parents, so I hope it didn’t scar her. She did keep saying, “That was not what I expected” afterward as we all tried to figure out the plot together.

After the movie was over and Beth had gotten home, but before Ranvita left, I saw Xander in the kitchen, dragging one of his back legs behind him. It seemed like he couldn’t move it at all. I alerted Beth and she pointed out that something like this had happened to him last summer and it only lasted about a half hour (the vet couldn’t explain it), so we waited and sure enough he made a full recovery. It’s worrying, though. As Beth said, having an elderly pet “is not for the faint of heart.” Someday it won’t be a false alarm, but that day was not this weekend.

Saturday: Protest

Beth, Noah, and I left for the rally late Saturday morning. I’d gone through the hand-painted signs we’ve kept from previous marches and rallies and found some gun control ones we could re-use. I hesitated over the more all-purpose “America Is Better Than This,” sign I made for some early Trump administration protest (I think it was immigration and the Muslim ban). I’d actually made it thinking I would re-use it, but I never did. The sad truth is while I got to fifty years old believing that, at fifty-five, I don’t anymore. Too many of my fellow Americans, including members of my extended family on both sides, watched the cruelty and corruption of the Trump years and didn’t flinch. But I do still believe in the power of protest and the ballot, so that’s why I still go to rallies and write get-out-the-vote postcards.

Beth wore an orange top and I thought about it, but even though I have two, they are both short-sleeved and the day was drizzly and unseasonably cool, so I went with a long-sleeved shirt that says Love is Love is Love on the front. It occurred to me that someone seeing it might think I was heading to Pride. We saw people obviously going to one event or the other on the Metro. In fact, in the Takoma Metro parking lot, we saw a woman I thought was probably going from the rally straight to Pride because her outfit was mostly orange, but she had a rainbow flag draped over her shoulders like a cape.

We arrived at the rally around 12:15. There was a timer at the bottom of the Jumbotron screen indicating the speeches had been going on for ten minutes or so. We missed X González but we heard plenty of speeches. We heard two sons of an eighty-six-year-old woman who died in the supermarket in Buffalo, and we heard the mayor of DC, and two young people, one who introduced and praised the mayor for her efforts on gun control and one who criticized those same efforts.

The most powerful speech, of those we saw anyway, was David Hogg, of Marjorie Stoneman Douglass. He’s an electrifying speaker. What I appreciated most about his speech was his focus on the many state-level gun control victories there have been since the Parkland shooting, including some in Florida. It’s so easy to think nothing has changed and despair, but there has been incremental progress. It made me think I really should get back to my postcard writing, which I’ve let lapse a bit. When he finished I was thinking of visiting the line of Porta-potties because I didn’t think it was going to get any better than that, but Representative Cori Bush was next with a gripping account of being a survivor of gun violence in the context of domestic violence, so I was glad I stayed for that.

During her speech, the timer stopped at 78 minutes and after she’d finished, it was announced that was how long it took for police to stop the gunman at Robb Elementary. It was an effective demonstration of how long that must have felt to the terrified children, teachers, and staff inside the building.

There was a moment of silence, but suddenly in the middle of it, people started running away from the stage. We hadn’t seen or heard what sparked it, but we ran, too, until someone from the stage implored people to stop running and said there was no threat. I didn’t find out what had happened until later, but apparently, a counter protester (I hadn’t even seen there was a counter protest—we must have been too far away) had jumped over the barrier, yelled, “I am the gun!” and threw something into the crowd. He was detained by park police and the speeches continued after that, but I saw several people crying immediately afterward and I noticed they were all kids or teens. It made me think how a lot of kids my kids’ age are traumatized by the ever-present specter of gun violence, as we hear about school shooting after school shooting. (I guess the equivalent for 80s teens was nuclear war. I was pretty much convinced there was going to be one when I was in high school, but the obvious difference is we never did have one.) It actually made me glad North did not attend the rally because two summers ago witnessing a car crash into our fence as they stood just feet away was one several factors that may have triggered their functional neurological disorder and left them partly paralyzed for months.

We didn’t stay much longer after that, because Beth needed to get back home and drive North to their friend Marisa’s birthday party. We took pictures by a field of bouquets of white and orange flowers, each of which presumably stood for some number of lives lost to gun violence. Part of the way to the Metro station, Noah and I peeled off because he wanted to stop for lunch. I’d eaten before we left, but I accompanied him to Corner Bakery and got an iced latte and a cookie—I ate half of it and saved the rest for later—and he got a sandwich, chips, and a muffin. The restaurant was filled with people in March for Our Lives t-shirts and others in rainbow gear.

If North hadn’t had a birthday party to attend it might have been nice to go from the rally to the Pride parade and meet up with them there. Pride was cancelled the past two years because of covid, but the two years before that we went to the festival and I thought the parade would have been a nice change of pace.

Noah and I came home and made a soba noodle-vegetable salad with peanut sauce for dinner together. North came home in time to watch half of O Brother Where Art Thou, after they plucked the index card with its title from the pile of approved films.

Sunday: Pride

Sunday morning, we were still undecided about Pride. Thunderstorms were predicted and Takoma Pride was postponed for two weeks hence. North was all for going to the DC festival, which had not cancelled, but Beth and I were unenthused about the idea of going to Pride in a downpour and she had work she needed to do, so she and I stayed home and North went alone to meet up with their friend Sol there. North has the same Love Is Love Is Love shirt I do (they were Christmas gifts from my mother years ago) and they actually did wear theirs to Pride.

As it turned out, it never stormed and they were able to stay a few hours. Apparently the kids had trouble finding it, initially going to the right address in the wrong quadrant of the city, but they managed on their own without calling for adult backup. North was using their wheelchair that day, as was Sol, which makes that feat more impressive. They said they had fun. They didn’t bring home too many tchotchkes, but they did pick up a tube of lip balm that looks like a tampon (which they are quite taken with it) and a new button.

I’m glad they went and I hope to go to Takoma’s smaller Pride celebration in two weeks. It’s another way of witnessing and standing up for our lives.

On the Horizon: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 66

Spring is on the horizon. There are crocuses and snowdrops in abundance down by the creek and elsewhere and I’ve seen aconite, winter jasmine, and one clump of daffodils in neighbors’ yards. Our own daffodils poked their heads out of the ground a few weeks ago, but have yet to open. The cherry tree at the end of the block that always wants to get the party started well before the other two dozen or so nearby trees are even thinking about it has swelling buds.

I moved the rosemary and parsley plants that have been living in a sunny spot in Noah’s room/Beth’s office back outside this weekend because I think they need the sun more than protection from the cold at this point. It still goes below freezing most nights, but not by much and they’re hardy enough for that. I’ll move them back inside if we have a cold snap.

The spring musical opens in a few weeks and North is costumes manager again, so they have rehearsal most days after school. It’s also the time of year when we start making plans for spring break and summer.

Travel News

The school district announced its snow day makeup plan and they scrounged up the necessary days by turning a teacher planning day in April into a half day and by adding two days to the end of the year. This is the very outcome I was hoping for because it leaves spring break intact. Now we just need to keep our fingers crossed it doesn’t snow again, but even if it does MCPS’s message implied any further snow days will be either remote instruction days or the district will apply to the state for a waiver.

It gave us enough certainty to plan our April trip to Michigan to meet one of North’s half-siblings from their donor’s side. The kids have been in touch since we got North a membership to the Donor Sibling Registry for their birthday last spring. Avery is a senior in high school, has two moms, and like North, identifies as non-binary. On the way to Ypsilanti we’re going to stop in Wheeling to see Beth’s mom, and then in Oberlin for North’s first college tour. It should be a fun trip.

And then this summer we’re going to the beach twice. Noah doesn’t know how long he’ll be home because he’s planning to spend the fall semester abroad and some of the programs he’s considering are summer-and-fall programs (or actually winter and spring since it’s Australia). This means he could be leaving any time between mid-July and late August.  We need to go to the beach early in the summer if we want him to come. But my sister’s family is moving from Ashland, Oregon to Davis, California in June or July and they can’t come until the move is complete, so we need to go late in the summer if we want them (and my mother, who is still recovering from her broken neck and will travel with them) to come. I still have some of the long-belated inheritance money I got from my father last summer, after putting most of it away for retirement and giving some away, so my elegant solution was two beach trips, one with me, Beth, and the kids the week of July 4th, and one with extended family in early August. We booked houses in Oberlin, Ypsilanti, and Rehoboth just this week. Having this settled is a relief because it was all up in the air for a while and I was anxious about it.

The one thing I wish I knew about the near future that I don’t know 100% for sure is whether Noah is coming home for all, part, or none of his spring break, which is in just two weeks. He’s directing a film for his advanced cinema production class and he was hoping if he could get a crew and actors to agree to stay on campus, filming during break would give them a solid block of time when no one has class. This made perfect sense and part of me hoped it would work out for him, but there’s no denying I would have been sad not to see him until May if that’s how it shook out, and the uncertainty was driving me more than a little crazy. Just this morning when Beth texted him about buying a bus ticket to come home, he said he probably would.

Medical News

In other news, I recently finished a program for newly diagnosed diabetics, consisting of two calls with a nurse and six Zoom sessions with a coach spread out over four months. Afterward I went in for bloodwork, and my A1C, a measure of average blood sugar from the past three months, is at the bottom of the prediabetic range, just a tad over normal. That’s with medication, of course. It doesn’t mean I don’t have diabetes any more but that between diet and the meds, my blood sugar has improved well beyond my primary care provider’s goal for me, not quite six months after diagnosis.

I’m still not happy with the reliability of the sensors I wear on my arm, which I sometimes test against a glucometer with finger pricks, and I go back and forth about whether I should give up on them and just use the blood method. The sensors, when they’re working, have two advantages, though. You don’t have to stab yourself with a sharp object several times a day and the app creates a graph that shows you when your blood sugar peaked and approximately how high. When you use finger pricks you have more accurate data points, but without much idea how they connect. I am trying to be at peace with the sensors’ erratic performance and not give up on them and take them off so soon. When it all starts to stress me out, sometimes I take a day off checking either way, and just try to eat intuitively.

Another piece of good news is that the hives I’ve had since last summer seems to be tapering off. On the allergist’s suggestion I started taking the antihistamines every other day (instead of every day) in mid-January and I noticed I wasn’t getting hives too often, so I stopped entirely the first week of February. Now I just take one when I have a breakout, which has only happened four times this month. The last time was in mid-February and three of the four times, the hives were very faint and not too itchy. Fingers crossed, maybe it’s over. We never did figure out what was triggering them.

Speaking of skin, Xander’s skin infection is back. It’s confined to a small patch on his stomach and because we caught it early, the medicated wipes seem to be stopping it from spreading, though it’s been a few weeks and it’s not getting better either. It doesn’t seem to be bothering him much, but he’s a good-natured cat, arthritis, deafness, irritated skin and all, so it can be hard to tell. He turned nineteen the week of Valentine’s Day, and after his health scares last summer, we’re all happy for all the time we have to cuddle on the couch and bed with him (and to give him a small fraction of the cat treats he requests).

One last medical update—as I mentioned above, my mom is still recovering from breaking her neck in October. She got her brace off in mid-January and is in physical therapy. She has some lingering pain, especially late in the day, and she has a limited range of motion in her neck, which impedes her ability to drive. That’s why she needs to travel with Sara and Dave.

It feels odd to have a roundup of medical issues and not mention North, but they’re pretty stable right now. They still have pain, but they’re able to get around where they need to with their cane most days. The pain psychologist they were seeing ended up not being a good fit, so after a few sessions, we decided not to continue. They’re happy about this, because they’d rather just get on with their life, without talking so much about this aspect of it.

And there’s a lot for them to get on with, the play, their birthday next month, a road trip to meet a new relative, and two beach weeks with kin they’ve known all or much of their life.

Twenty Halloweens: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 55

You’ve probably guessed I’m here to tell you about Halloween and I am, but first a few non-Halloween-related items. 

Assorted October News

Noah’s fall break was a little two weeks ago. It was just a four-day weekend, too short to justify his spending two of those four days in transit to come home and go back to school, so he stayed put. Two years ago we all met up in Hershey, which is in between Takoma Park and Ithaca and we went to Hershey Park in the Dark, which was a lot of fun, but that wasn’t feasible this year because Beth’s union’s online convention was the week after his break and Beth was absolutely swamped with work. But a candy-themed amusement park would be a diabetic challenge, I suppose, so maybe it was for the best.

The week after his break I finally stripped off the sheets that had been on Noah’s bed since he left in August and washed them. I thought replacing them with flannel sheets for when he comes home at Thanksgiving would cheer me up, but in mid-October Thanksgiving was still seeming pretty far off, so it didn’t. Now that it’s November, it’s seeming less impossibly far away.

Around the same time, the skin infection on Xander’s stomach came back, though this time it was not as extensive as it was in the summer. He has a bald spot there that was bright red a couple weeks ago. We’ve been treating it twice a day with leftover medicated wipes and it’s gotten much better, a very pale pink that might be his natural skin color. It’s hard to say as under ideal circumstances, you don’t see a cat’s skin.

In more serious medical news, my mom had a bad fall almost two weeks ago. She was hiking in Olympic peninsula with her gentleman friend Jon, and while climbing up a staircase to see a waterfall, she slipped off it, and tumbled fifty feet down a hill until she ran into a tree, which broke her fall. It also broke her neck. She fractured five vertebrae. She had to be airlifted to Seattle, where she’s been in the hospital ever since. Apparently when the EMTs told Mom they were going to put her in a basket to get her into the helicopter she said, “Does this mean I’m a basket case?”

She had surgery the next day to fuse three of the vertebrae and she’s in a neck collar. Jon stayed as long as he could, but he has health issues of his own and he had some medical appointments he couldn’t miss, so he had to travel back to Oregon alone. My sister flew out to Seattle to take his place and when Mom is discharged, which is supposed to happen tomorrow, she’ll drive her back to Ashland. Jon’s going to move in to Mom’s house for a while, and her friends have organized a meal train, and she’s found a home health care worker, so the pieces seem to be falling into place for her recovery, which is supposed to last two or three months. It’s times like this I wish we all lived closer to each other.

Halloween #20

Back in Maryland, on the second to last Saturday in October, we went to the farm stand in Northern Virginia where we always get our pumpkins. We’ve been going there since some time in the 1990s because it’s run by the family of a friend of ours from college. There was bad traffic on the way there so the drive was over an hour and we arrived three minutes before the stand closed at four o’clock. But the woman staffing it seemed laid back and didn’t hurry us. In fact, she took another customer who arrived after we did. We didn’t linger, though, as we picked out pumpkins for jack-o-lanterns, a pie pumpkin for soup, decorative gourds, cider, salsa, and some produce.

We usually have Chinese food after this outing, but it was early for dinner, so we had a walk in Meadowlark Botanical Gardens, where there were quite a few different groups having professional photos done, families, and a group of teenagers. Beth thought the teen group might have been having  homecoming pictures taken, but is that even a thing, homecoming photos? It’s not like a wedding, or even prom. Anyway, some of the girls were in heels so high and dresses so short walking over a short bridge was a serious challenge. It was kind of nerve-wracking to watch. I was afraid one of them would fall.

Eventually, we got takeout and ate it at another park. Eating Chinese when you can’t eat soy may be an even more serious challenge than walking outside in stiletto heels. (I couldn’t say for sure, as I’ve never tried the heels.) I had to skip all the fun fake meat I like at this particular restaurant—the shrimp is really good—and I decided for this evening only I’d have a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy for soy sauce. Based on taste, I think the spring rolls and seaweed-mushroom soup didn’t have it anyway, but the sauce on my eggplant dish probably did.

On the way home, we stopped for frozen yogurt. North wanted dessert and I suggested Sweet Frog since it’s serve yourself, and I could choose the original tart flavor and get a small portion. I did try some sugary toppings, mostly brownie bits and crushed Oreos, and I added whipped cream. It didn’t feel too austere and my blood sugar didn’t go out of range, so I think it was a successful dessert experience.

The next night we carved our pumpkins. Beth did the gargoyle, I did the spider, and North did the face with the knife. I had some tricky moments with mine, but I think they all came out well and North’s was particularly impressive. After carving, we watched It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. It felt odd to do these things without Noah, as we watched the show with him every year before college, and in Hershey two years ago, and a year ago he was home to watch it and carve a pumpkin. Of course, I’m glad and grateful he’s at school and having an almost normal semester, but it’s still hard to have him gone sometimes.

Three days before Halloween, I led my book club’s discussion on The Haunting of Hill House. I used to teach this book in class on genre fiction, so you think it would be pretty easy to pull together a presentation. But I haven’t taught it since 2004 and while I did find my teaching notes, they were pretty cryptic, as I wrote them a few days before teaching, not expecting to need to make sense of them seventeen years later. So I was very stressed for a while because I love this book and I wanted to do a good job and I was worried I’d forgotten everything I used to know or think about it. But I re-read a Shirley Jackson biography and I had extensive underlining in the novel and my teaching notes did remind me there’s some criticism of Hill House in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, which I had on hand, so I was able to cobble together an outline of what I wanted to discuss. 

And… it wasn’t a disaster. It actually went really well. Book club only recently started meeting in person again this month and attendance has been sparse. Five people came, which is about how many came for the last session (on Vanity Fair) but people were engaged and I had just about the right amount of material and I came home so buzzed I couldn’t get to sleep for a long time. In fact, though earlier in the day I’d been thinking I will never volunteer to do this again, on the drive home I was wondering how it would be to do Frankenstein or Dracula.

North went to school in costume on Friday. They went as a drowned person this year, with pale green face paint, and seaweed and skeleton hands on their shirt (which are supposed to be pulling them down). The GSA had a party after school they called Homo Hoco, a sort of alternative homecoming, so North got to wear their costume to that, too.

They actually designed the costume with Takoma’s Halloween parade and costume contest in mind, but they found out just a few days ahead of time that Saturday afternoon’s parade conflicted with a mandatory play rehearsal, so they had to miss it. If you’ve been reading this blog a while you know how important this contest has been to both of my kids since they were little, so that was a blow.

I was sad for North but also myself because I love the parade contest and we’ve had kids in it eighteen of the twenty Halloweens we’ve lived in Takoma (the exceptions being the first year when it was cancelled because of the DC snipers and last year when it was cancelled by covid). Even when the parade was rained out, the contest always went on, inside an elementary school gym, and we were always there. Before my mom moved out West, she often came for a Halloween weekend visit and marched in the parade with us.

And then I realized we could go, even without North. I proposed it to Beth and she seemed a little surprised, but then she agreed. We walked down to the community center, which was the end point of the parade, so we could watch it go by and then stay for the judging. The parade was cancelled last year so it’s been a couple years and what struck me was how few people we know were there. Noah’s peers are off at college and North’s have either decided they’re too old for the parade or, like North, have extracurricular obligations. Even Keira, who’s a year older than North, a many-time contest winner, and the only teen I know to take the contest as seriously as my kids, wasn’t there.

I saw only two adults I knew– a member of my book club who was there with his elementary-age sons, and the mother of three boys, the older two of whom used to wait at elementary and middle school bus stops with my kids, who was there with her youngest (who marched in his soccer uniform). When she saw us, she said she’d been looking all over for North because she wanted to see their costume and she was sad to hear North wasn’t there.

There were a lot of nice costumes, as always. I especially liked the toddler in a homemade owl costume with many felt feathers, the tiny boy dressed as the Swedish chef from the Muppets, the boy dressed as a gumball machine, the girl who was a bookshelf, and the two wizards pulling a papier-mâché dragon on wheels.  The owl, Swedish chef, and the dragon won prizes in their age groups, but the gumball machine and the bookshelf didn’t. Beth also thought the woman who walked the parade route dressed as a scarecrow on stilts deserved a prize for her efforts. We paid careful attention to the scariest prize for teen and adult, because that would have been North’s competition. Beth correctly guessed it would go to the boy in the red-splattered t-shirt, gloves, and hockey mask.

As the winners were announced, Beth took their pictures and texted them to Noah so the two of them could judge the judging. This is also a family tradition. Beth and I have often thought that since we have such firmly held opinions about costumes, we should volunteer to be judges once our kids are finished participating in it. If we’d known North wasn’t going to be in it earlier, I would have volunteered this year. I have a vision of us being old women who’ve been judging the contest for decades, but Beth thinks they might not let us do it after the first year because of the intensity of our opinions.

As we left, Beth mentioned that Noah did not even ask why we were even watching the costume contest judging if North wasn’t in it. In our family, it’s not a question that needed to be asked.

On Halloween proper, North made baked apples and we ate them while we watched The Bad Seed, or North and I did—Beth got her fill of mildly scary movies when the three of us watched Nightbooks earlier in the weekend. While we were watching the movie, Beth was putting the finishing touches on the yard. Here’s a video she took once it got dark:

After the movie, North heated up and ate a frozen burrito for dinner, applied their makeup for just the right deathly pallor, put on their costume and left for Zoë’s neighborhood where a big group of friends and friends of friends were going trick-or-treating. The group included Zoë (who went as Mr. Clean), Norma (grim reaper), and North’s elementary school best friend Megan (witch).

[Aside: It makes me glad North is able to socialize more. I remember last fall them saying all they wanted was to go to a movie with Zoë and Norma, “and have them tell me why it was bad even though I liked it.” And two weekends ago, they did just that, meeting up in Silver Spring to see The Addams Family 2, and then Beth picked them up and brought home two pizzas from Little Caesar’s and they stayed for a couple hours. I don’t know if Zoë and Norma ragged on the movie or not, but the whole event left North almost radiantly happy.]

Staring just before six, when two boys dressed as praying mantises came up to our porch, Beth and I took turns sitting on the porch and handing out candy. We bought less candy than usual so not to have a lot of leftovers and—wouldn’t you know it?—we had more trick-or-treaters than usual. After a half hour or so, I started emptying the festive gift bags Beth had assembled into the bowl and telling kids to take just one piece each, as we were running low. Most of them listened so we didn’t run out and we finished the night a little after nine o’clock with one last duo of un-costumed preteens and just six pieces of candy left.

As always, we got many compliments on our decorations. Our around-the-corner neighbor said it was “the best house in the neighborhood” and one kid said, “I like your decorations… No, I love your decorations.” One parent commented, “I guess you guys are really into this holiday.”

Yes, we are. We’ve enjoyed our twenty Halloweens in this house and look forward to all the ones to come, whether we’re judging the contest or marching with our grandkids in the parade.

After the Beach: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 48

Going Home

So for some reason we didn’t decide to squat in the beach house and we drove home from the beach. On the way out of town we stopped at the Crocs outlet and Beth, North, and I each got a pair. Beth’s are gray and mine are black with a white band, which I thought was kind of daring, as I’ve always had navy blue ones, but North got a pair of black, glittery platform Crocs with spikes on them. They are the most unusual pair they’ve had since they were five and had a pair of glow-in-the-dark unicorn Crocs they adored. So in case you were wondering how long it takes to go from unicorn to Goth-themed footwear, the answer is a decade.

We went out for pizza and salads at Matchbook in Silver Spring, near YaYa’s hotel. In the morning, Beth helped YaYa with her new phone, then she brought her by the house so everyone could hang out in the back yard a bit, where we showed her our garden and said our goodbyes before Beth drove her to the airport. We were all sad to say see the last member of the beach house crew leave.

Post-Beach Weekend #1

But one of the nice things about a Friday-to-Friday rental is you still have the whole weekend when you get home, so you’re not spending it all doing laundry (me) or grocery shopping (Beth). We had time for two outings, first to an outdoor screening of Cruella and then to a park to walk around a lake and fly Noah’s drone.

Mike (the filmmaker who sometimes employs Noah) and his wife Sara (the Secretary-Treasurer of the union where Beth works) hosted a backyard showing of Cruella the Saturday after we returned. Because Mike’s a filmmaker, it wasn’t projected on a sheet or the side of the house, but on a portable movie screen, as big as you might see in a small theater. They provided popcorn, candy, and drinks, and showed Warner Brothers cartoons before the feature presentation. I didn’t know too many of the people there other than Mike, Sara, and their three girls, but it was a fun event. My assessment of the movie (and Beth’s, too) is that was enjoyable and the performances are good (especially Emma Thompson as the Baroness), but it doesn’t really do the work of a prequel because it’s hard to see how Cruella’s character arc leads to her character in the original. For what it’s worth, Sara argued that it’s supposed to cause you to see the original Cruella in a new light, but I’m not sure about that.

Sunday afternoon, Beth, Noah and I went droning. Noah had some trouble with his drone the last day we were at the beach and he’d made some repairs to it at home, but since you can’t fly a drone as close to Washington D.C. as we live, he wanted to go to a park where he could test the repairs. We went to Centennial Park in Howard County. We’d been there once last summer, in early August, just a few weeks into North’s paralysis. I was surprised how well I remembered the path around the lake. We even saw a heron by the same little bridge where we’d seen a heron the year before. Because we weren’t pushing North in a wheelchair this time (North wasn’t there at all, having elected to stay home), we walked further this time, all the way around the two-and-a-half-mile lake loop, and off a little spur to see a pond. Noah flew in a few places and the drone functioned perfectly. As we often did last summer, we got Starbucks on the way home. Sipping my pink drink evoked that odd summer and all its twists and turns.

Last Week of July

Neither of the kids had camp, a volunteer gig, or work the next week, but North had an appointment at the pain clinic, an orthodontist appointment, and a therapy session, and Xander had an appointment with a veterinary cardiologist. Only the therapy was online, so Beth was busy driving the kid and the cat around. (Noah had a drum lesson, too, but gets to the music school by himself on the bus.)

Monday we went to the pain clinic at Children’s National Hospital for a follow-up visit about North’s chronic pain. The doctor thought their gait looked good, and we ended up with a prescription for six sessions of physical therapy, probably starting with aqua therapy to see if that can help them walk longer distances and with less pain. North will also be seeing a pain psychologist in the fall to work on coping methods. North’s not super excited about another round of physical therapy.

Wednesday North and I went to the Crossroads farmers’ market and got pupusas for lunch. This walk is not quite three-quarters of a mile each way and that’s in North’s comfort zone, but this time they did it with no crutch and in platform crocs to boot, so it must have been a good day for them.

That same day Noah and I finished reading The Gods of Jade and Shadow and watching the first season of The Leftovers. We’re hoping to get one more season in before he leaves for school in mid-August. (People in various combinations that include Noah have also met summer goals of finishing season 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and season 4 of Blackish, and the whole family is closing in on season 2 of Dickinson.)

On Thursday, Beth took Xander to see a veterinary cardiologist, on our vet’s recommendation. I would have gone in case there were any hard decisions to make at the appointment, but they are only letting one person per animal in the clinic. And the upshot is his heart looks surprisingly good for a cat his age, whose littermate died of a blood clot. His blood pressure is good and he has some mild to moderate thickening of his heart muscle. We’re supposed to give him aspirin hidden in a cat treat, more because of his brother’s medical history than anything the cardiologist saw on the scan, and if we want we can get him re-assessed in six to nine months. The vet thought when he seems to lose control of one or both his back legs (and this happened again the day before the appointment) it’s his arthritis acting up.

I’ve thought he might be having a life-threatening emergency three times now this summer, so this is a relief. We considered boarding him at a kennel when we went to the beach, but we decided to have a cat sitter check in on him every day and I’m glad now that’s what we did because being boarded would have been stressful for him.

Post-Beach Weekend #2

The big event this weekend was a trip to Butler’s Orchard. We’ve been to the farm market a couple times this summer, but we hadn’t picked anything ourselves. The weather was lovely, low eighties and not that humid, and three kinds of berries were in season, so it seemed like a good time to go. We got two quarts of blackberries, a quart of blueberries, and two pints of raspberries. Blueberry season is almost over so there weren’t many people in that field, but there were more folks among the blackberry canes and I could hear parents of small children saying things like: “Now we’re only going to pick the black ones, not the red ones. No, not the red ones. That one’s not ripe yet. We’ll go to the raspberries later, that’s where we pick the red ones.” Let’s say it was evocative of berry picking in my children’s younger days. I appreciate not having to say anything like that or having to worry about either of them running into the path of an oncoming farm truck. 

There’s a sign as you leave that says, “Have a Berry Nice Day” and, as I usually do, I asked if everyone had, and Beth said yes. I did, too.

When we got home I froze half the blackberries and half the raspberries, and today I made a blueberry kuchen and there’s raspberry ice cream in the freezer that North made. Sometime in the next couple weeks I’ll use some of the blackberries in a peach-blackberry cobbler, so I think we shouldn’t have any trouble enjoying the fruits of our labors. Now that it’s August, I can feel the end of summer on the horizon, which makes me happy and sad for the obvious reasons. I hope your late summer days are happy and fruitful.

Like the Fourth of July: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 45

You just gotta ignite the sky, and let it shine
Just own the night like the 4th of July

From “Firework,” by Tor Erik Hermansen, et al. Performed by Katy Perry

We had a nice Fourth of July weekend. I hope you did, too, or a nice Canada Day weekend for the Canadians among you. But before I get to that…

An Update on Xander

Just five days after we took him to the animal hospital for his skin and ear infections, he gave us another scare. Wednesday morning right after Beth gave him his medicine, he fell down and seemed to lose control of his back legs. Well, this is exactly what happened to Matthew the day he died (and they were brothers), so Beth and I feared the worst.

Beth had been scheduled to go into her office but she let her colleagues know she wouldn’t be in and we were packing for a day in the animal hospital garage and debating whether we should wake the kids and ask if they wanted to come, when, after about a half hour of partial paralysis, Xander got up and started walking around as if nothing were wrong. Beth called and left a message for the animal hospital, explaining what had happened, and asking if we should bring him in. The answer was no, though of course, this doesn’t seem like a good sign for his general health. He had an appointment already scheduled at our regular vet’s office Friday, so we’ll see what the vet thinks then.

Meanwhile, almost a week has passed and he seems in good spirits. The infection on his stomach seemed to clear up, then it relapsed a little, but it still looks better than it did originally. The eardrops make his ears so greasy, it’s hard to tell if the crud is gone. He’s able to jump on and off the bed and climb stairs. He’s been going out into the yard occasionally to enjoy the sun and soaking up all the extra love and attention everyone is inexplicably bestowing on him. He’s always been an easy-going cat and he’s not letting the indignities of old age get to him.

Kayaking

Beth had a three-day weekend for the Fourth. She took up kayaking this spring and on Saturday morning, Noah and I went with her to Black Hills Regional Park to try our hands at it. Partly that’s because Beth wants to go on a dolphin-watching kayaking tour of the Chesapeake Bay when we’re at the beach later this month and I was unsure, having never kayaked, or maybe we did just once in our twenties or early thirties. Beth thinks we went canoeing on the Potomac. I thought it was kayaking on the C&O canal. Our youth is shrouded in mystery. The point is, if I’d ever been in kayak at all, the last time was more than twenty years ago.  Noah decided to come along, too, but North opted out. They attended a kayaking-and-canoeing themed week at Girl Scout camp when they were nine and thought they remembered it well enough.

It was a beautiful morning, sunny and remarkably mild for July, in the high seventies. The little lake was very busy with people in kayaks, canoes, rowboats, paddleboats, and paddleboards. It turns out Noah is a natural at kayaking. He got the hang of it right away. It took me longer. I found it tiring, and I was much slower than Beth and Noah, and I kept drifting to the right and needing to correct course.

We slipped through a tunnel under a berm to emerge in a smaller area where there were no other boaters. There were a lot of turtles, however, swimming and sunning on logs, and a family of geese, two adults and five half-grown goslings. There were also a lot of tree trunks poking up out of the water, because it’s an artificial lake that was flooded around thirty-five years ago. I think it would look eerie on an overcast day.

After we’d explored that area, we crossed back to the other side to go down a fork of the lake where Beth had seen a beavers’ dam on a previous outing. I was worn out, though, and didn’t think I could make it that far so I decided to rest at the mouth of the fork while Beth and Noah went ahead. (Neither of them ended up making it to the dam this time.) The wind sent me drifting further down the fork than I meant to go and I started to worry how I’d paddle out against the current, but when I turned around and started back, something clicked into place. I sat up straighter than I had when I’d been using the backrest and I found it easier to paddle. We were out of time, though, having rented the kayaks for two hours. I decided I’d like to come back and try it again before hitting the Bay in a kayak.

After we left the lake, we had lunch at Noodles & Company, and then ran a series of errands, including but not limited to stopping at Butler’s farm market for fruit, vegetables, pasta, and pastries, going to the animal hospital for a refill on Xander’s eardrops, and picking up my newly resoled Birks. It was a very nice outing.

Fourth of July

Sunday was the Fourth. For the second year in a row there was no parade and no fireworks in Takoma. It was actually the third year for no fireworks because there have been renovations going on at the middle school that usually hosts the fireworks for that long and there’s no comparable open space anywhere in town. I wasn’t sure why the parade was cancelled, because our vaccination numbers in Montgomery County are very good—98% of seniors and 88% of everyone age twelve and up has had at least one shot. But Beth pointed out, the parade probably takes a long time to plan and when the call needed to be made, it wasn’t clear what things would look like in July. And of course, there are the under-twelves to consider.

However, there were fireworks in D.C. (There were fireworks there last year, too, but it seemed inadvisable to go to the mall.) So our plans for the day included a picnic dinner in our backyard and a trip downtown. There’s a good view from the roof of Beth’s office building and it was open this year, so that’s where we went.

Until dinner, the day was a pretty normal summer Sunday. Beth went grocery shopping and I put the groceries away. Beth worked in the garden, putting our zinnia seedlings and watermelon vines into the ground, and assembled most of the picnic dinner, while I made the deviled eggs and the sour cherry sauce for ice cream. We all missed Takoma’s quirky and spirited parade. Beth said it didn’t feel “like the Fourth of July” without it.

We left for the fireworks around eight. On the drive there I observed people having cookouts in tiny yards in front of rowhouses, and large groups of twenty and thirty-somethings walking to the mall, which reminded me of when I was a twenty and thirty-something who lived within walking distance of the mall.

When we got to Beth’s office building we had a choice of two different levels and we chose the lower one. The penthouse deck has a portico design and Noah thought the columns might block our view. All the other CWA employees and their families chose the higher level, though, so we had the lower deck to ourselves. We got our chairs set up and Noah took pictures of the Capitol. We could see fireworks from various suburban municipalities and D.C. neighborhood displays all around us in a sort of panoramic effect.

The official D.C. fireworks began at 9:08, right on schedule. When they were in smiley face patterns the little kids up on the penthouse deck exclaimed and when they were in heart shapes they just about lost their minds. During some of the classic circle displays, one of them said, “It looks like the coronavirus” and then I couldn’t unsee it. Fortunately, the next few looked less spiky and more like dandelions. The display lasted about twenty minutes. On our way out of the building, I asked Beth if it seemed more like the Fourth of July, now that we’d seen fireworks, and she said yes.

On the drive home, we saw quite a few more neighborhood fireworks, and as we drove down North Capitol Street, we could see people setting them off on a side street. Noah played his Fourth of July playlist. It starts with Katy Perry’s “Firework,” but it grows every year. Beth and I sang along with Springsteen’s “Independence Day,” which may have been added for our benefit. Traffic wasn’t horrible, so by the time the playlist ended we were just blocks from home.

Date #4

There was one day left in the weekend, so Beth and I had a date that lasted from late morning to late afternoon. We went to see the Rita Moreno documentary at AFI, which I recommend, and then out for arepas. The original plan was tapas, but that restaurant wasn’t open for lunch. We got tequeños (because Beth loves the cilantro-garlic sauce that comes with them) and two arepas to share, one with avocado and cheese and the other with black beans and cheese. I tried the sugar cane juice, which was very sweet. I probably wouldn’t get it again, but I was glad to have satisfied my curiosity.

We swung by the house so I could cycle laundry and then we went to swim at Long Branch pool. We invited the kids along to this portion of the festivities and while we weren’t surprised Noah said no, we were surprised when North did. They are usually up for a trip to the pool. But since we were alone, I guess it was an extension of the date, though we were separated for most of it, as I was swimming laps.

Later I posted on Facebook that it was our first date since the pandemic started, but then I remembered we went out for pizza one night in late May when Noah was at YaYa’s and North was sleeping over at Zoë’s and that was definitely a date, so I corrected the post to say second.

But it made me wonder exactly what constitutes a date? How about the picnic of takeout Greek food we had on under a park shelter on a rainy day in late March on our way back from being vaccinated in Western Maryland? Or the walk through the snowy woods in Blackwater Falls State Park on Christmas day? My cousin Holly, who’s widowed, said those both count, so I will take her word for it. But I draw the line at counting the trip to Ikea we took a couple weeks ago. However many dates there have been, I’m optimistic they will become more frequent in the months to come. And that’s a happy thought.

When You’re a Jet: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 44

When you’re a Jet,
If the spit hits the fan,
You got brothers around,
You’re a family man…

From “Jet Song” by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim

Monday

North’s musical drama camp was held outdoors for the second year in a row and that meant I was keeping an eye on the weather, both for heat and rain. In late June in Maryland, you’re likely to get both. Last year, all the rehearsal days were able to go on as scheduled for the two-week camp, but the final performance had to be pushed up a day because of a predicted storm.

This year the camp was just one week. Monday was supposed to be hot and humid and Tuesday rainy, but the rest of the week looked pleasant. Monday was indeed hot and humid—the county issued a heat warning from one p.m. to seven, but camp ended at one, so North would only be out in the worst of it for the time it took them to walk home from the park. It’s only about a fifteen to twenty-minute walk, so when they didn’t get home until 1:40, my assumption was camp had run late. (That wouldn’t be unusual.) But when North got home, they collapsed into the easy chair by the front door and informed me they’d hurt their knee during one of the dance numbers.

When they tried to get out of the chair, the knee was stiff and painful and for the rest of the day they were using both forearm crutches to get around the house. (These days they use crutches only when they leave the house and usually just one.) This was discouraging, because while they still have chronic pain, they’ve gone a long time without an injury that exacerbated it.

While they were resting in the chair, I was straightening up in the living room and decided to take all the spring birthday cards (North’s, Noah’s, and mine) and the Mother’s Day cards down from the mantel. When I took down our birthday card to North I remembered they’d never registered on the Donor Sibling Registry site and I asked if they wanted to do it. They said yes, so I handed them the card with their donor number written inside and after filling out the online forms and entering my debit card number, they found they have thirteen half-siblings on their biological father’s side, all born between 2003 and 2007, including one half-brother who is within a month of their age. However, all the messages were from parents and none were more recent than 2013. North left a message in hopes of hearing back, but I warned them it might not be realistic to expect anything soon as no one seemed to be monitoring the site closely.

That night we watched the first half of West Side Story and North let us know which songs in that part would be in the revue (“Jet Song” and “Gee, Officer Krupke”). They hadn’t been cast yet, but some of the possibilities Gretchen, the camp director, was considering for them were Tony, Diesel (called Ice in the film), and Velma. I was impressed with the idea of them being Tony but they pointed out it would be mostly songs, with just a little dialogue, and everyone sings, so there really wouldn’t be any leads. This did turn out to be true.

The show was going consist entirely of songs the Jets sing together because the group of kids who come to this camp year after year tends to be mostly white and the optics of a bunch of white kids playing the Puerto Rican Sharks wouldn’t be good. In another adjustment, North and two other kids talked Gretchen into cutting these lines from “Gee, Officer Krupke”: “My sister wears a mustache/My brother wears a dress/Goodness gracious, that’s why I’m a mess!” Gretchen tried to argue for historical context and satire but the kids thought in a three-song performance that just wouldn’t come across. They did keep this lyric: “’Cause ev’ry Puerto Rican/’S a lousy chicken!” which North said was unnerving to sing repeatedly in a public park, with passersby.

Tuesday

Tuesday morning was rainy as expected. Gretchen emailed early in the morning to say camp would end early, at noon, or possibly 11:30, and it would be held mostly on her sheltered patio– as her back yard borders the park where camp takes place—but they’d probably have to spend some time dancing in the rain. North was still having difficulty getting around so I helped them get their script and lyric sheets printed and in their backpack and I made their mid-morning snack (a fruit salad) and packed it. Beth drove them to camp.

Three hours later, Beth brought them home. They weren’t soaking wet and said the campers had spent most of the morning sheltered on Gretchen’s patio, working on lines and sewing the letters JETS onto the backs of the hoodies they’re all wearing as costumes. Eventually, they’d embroider the names of their characters on the front. In North’s case, this would be Tony, as they’d be playing the lovelorn Jet after all.

North said the campers did leave the shelter to dance for about an hour when it wasn’t raining too hard. I asked if they’d been able to dance at all with their hurt knee and they said they managed to adapt some of the moves. Because Gretchen’s known North since they were three, she has plenty of experience adjusting her choreography for North’s various mobility challenges, often with very little notice. I figured it would all work out.

After camp that afternoon, North reported, much to our surprise, that the mother of one of their half-sisters had already sent them a brief message. So we know the girl’s first name, and that she’s eighteen years old, but not much else about her. North wrote back and is waiting to hear more.

We finished watching West Side Story that evening. I noticed that in the movie, Tony’s not in “Cool,” the last song in the lineup (and neither is Riff, because he’s dead). I asked North if they’d be in it, because I guessed with just three songs, Gretchen would put everyone in all of them, and I was right.

After the movie was over, we discussed how the body count is lower in West Side Story than in Romeo and Juliet and North observed it’s odd that all these gang members seem to have classical ballet training. But I have to say that even as problematic and outdated as parts of it are, it’s still a compelling film, with a tight plot (thanks, Shakespeare) and so many wonderful songs. It will be nice to have seen it recently, if Beth and I make good on our intention to go see the Rita Moreno documentary soon or if we see the new West Side Story when it comes out this winter.

Wednesday-Thursday

By Wednesday afternoon, North was walking around the house without support. They said their knee wasn’t very painful but still pretty stiff. (They felt steady enough on their feet to make  a blueberry sauce for some vanilla ice cream we had on hand.) While the kids and I watched an episode of Shadow and Bone, North embroidered a T and an O on the hoodie they’d be wearing in the show. They did the N and the Y while I made dinner.

After diner, North received another message from the mother of a different half-sibling (age seventeen) and this mom passed on the kid’s email address, so the ball was rolling on getting in touch. By Thursday afternoon, North was scrolling through the newly found half-sibling’s Instagram feed and showed us some pictures. There’s a slight resemblance, especially in the shape of their faces, though Noah says he can’t see it. This one, who I’m going to call Alexis for now, though that’s not her name, has two moms and lives in Michigan and uses female and gender-neutral pronouns interchangeably. Because the sperm bank we used is located in Virginia and there are so many siblings I’ve been wondering if any will live nearby. I guess we may find out soon.

Thursday night, shortly before we went to bed, I noticed that our cat Xander’s belly was bare of fur and the skin looked inflamed and was oozing in places. That re-arranged our plans for the next day.

Friday

After Beth dropped North off at camp, she and I headed for the animal hospital with Xander because there were no appointments available at our regular vet and the hospital takes drop-ins.

When Matthew got sick last summer, they had people drop their animals off and leave and they’d call you when it was time to come back. Beth had called and found out that you’re still not allowed inside, so we expected something similar. Instead they wanted us to wait in the garage. (I could see the privacy screen in the corner was still there, which brought back bad memories of Matthew being euthanized in that very parking garage. I guess they’re still doing it there.)

Beth called inside and found the procedure was different now. She talked to someone on the phone who asked questions about Xander’s condition and medical history, then a tech came to the car to get him and take him inside and we were told to wait, and given an estimate of two hours. To make a long story short, it was more like four hours, and Beth had not brought her laptop because she didn’t expect any wait. She had to write something for work and was trying to draft it on her phone, “like a young person,” but it wasn’t going well, so I went to a nearby CVS and got her a pen and a notebook, so she could write on paper, like an old person. Shortly after that, almost an hour and a half into the wait, I caught a Lyft home, leaving Beth to write and take calls in the car, because we thought at least one parent should catch the drama camp performance, which was at 12:30.

I had just enough time to 1) talk to Beth on the phone and find out the vet thought it was itching from some kind of skin condition that was making Xander lick and scratch his skin raw, but that they needed to run some tests, 2) charge my phone for ten minutes or so, and 3) find some camp chairs before Noah and I left for the park. He had his camera, a tripod, and a microphone to record the performance. We got there about fifteen minutes early so we could talk to Gretchen about where he should set up and we caught the tail end of a final run-through of “Gee, Officer Krupke.”

The performance started twenty minutes late because we were waiting for all the parents to arrive, so I had time to read my texts from Beth about Xander. The lab tests showed he had both a bacterial infection on the skin of his stomach and a fungal infection in his ears (which have been looking kind of scabby). That he has two separate kinds of infections made me wonder if his immune system is suppressed for some reason, other than being old. He’s eighteen and showing his age in various ways—he’s arthritic and half-deaf and possibly a little senile. (He’s still plenty strong, though, as we learned when we gave him his medicine.) So, in the short run, he should be fine, but it’s a reminder he’s no spring chicken. The day before his vet adventure he spent almost the whole day napping on a chair in the back yard, enjoying the sun.

The actors waited in the shade of a tree and I could hear North talking about how the high of performing always makes the rehearsals worth it. This might have been for the benefit of the two newbie campers, aged ten and twelve. The rest of the cast ranged from fifteen to almost seventeen and they’ve all been acting together for years, in North’s case since they were five.  All the actors were in black hoodies and black or denim shorts or pants. North’s hoodie was actually part of their Halloween costume, and had glow-in-the-dark paint spatter on it. (I didn’t see the point in buying a second black hoodie and North agreed.)

The show consisted of a wordless prologue and the three songs, with a bit of introductory dialogue. Gretchen incorporated the playground equipment into the choreography at the very beginning. The kids emerged from the corners of the playground or slid down the slide or climbed down a ladder to converge near a bench. It was a good use of the space. Based on the dancing in the prologue, I asked North later if any of the actors had ballet training because I wondered if a couple of them might have, but North said no.

North had a solo in “Jet Song,” singing the first two lines in the stanza quoted above. They also had to take two stage falls in “Cool” and managed it well. “Gee, Officer Krupke” was last, which surprised me a little because it put the songs out of order, but without much plot to link them, it probably didn’t matter. The kids skillfully mined the song for it comedic content, especially Grace, who was playing A-rab, the much analyzed boy at the center of the song. It also let the show go out on a high note, because it really is a fun song.

Here’s the show, if you have a spare fourteen and a half minutes and you’d like to see it.

Watching it after the fact, I’m impressed with how much choreography the kids learned in a week. In a way the camp has come full circle. It started as a one-week, half-day camp when the kids were tiny and as the shows got more ambitious it grew to a two-week, full-day camp in which they produced scaled-down versions of shows that were recognizable as plays, not just a few songs from a play. But the pandemic and older kids’ busy schedules have shrunk it down to something resembling its original form. However, preteens and teens can learn a lot more complicated lyrics and dances in that amount of time than when they were preschoolers and kindergarteners.

After the show was over, the actors wanted to linger in the park and socialize. There’s a post-performance pizza tradition, so Maggie’s mom ordered pizza from Pizza Movers, which caused North to point out what we’ve all lamented many times this spring and summer, that they no longer offer delivery, so they can’t really be said to move the pizza. Maggie pointed out “They move the pizza from the kitchen to your hands,” but the general consensus was that this wasn’t good enough.

Noah and I didn’t stay for pizza, because in all the commotion of the day I’d forgotten to bring money and I was already letting North freeload off Maggie’s mom, and there weren’t a lot of other parents staying, which might have been what the kids wanted. Gretchen’s been saying this might be the last year of the camp. She said the same thing last year, but in case it is, I wanted to let them enjoy each other’s company, after North’s eleventh year of putting on a show with a gradually changing, but largely stable group of kids.

Some of these kids North’s known even longer, as North met Gretchen’s daughter Grace in Gretchen’s preschool drama class when they were both three and they met Maggie in preschool when they were both two. Speaking of Maggie and preschool, both North and Maggie are going to be counselors at tinkering camp at their old preschool the same week in July. I’m glad North has these long-lasting connections, even as they find new ones through school and activities and now the sibling registry. Keeping old friends and meeting new family members is a good thing.

Beth got home shortly after Noah and I did, with Xander. We rubbed his belly with antibacterial wipes and gave him an oral antibiotic, but it turned out the anti-fungal eardrops weren’t in the bag of supplies, so Beth had to drive back to the animal hospital after dinner to go get them. Xander is family, too, and we want to take good care of him, for as long as we’re lucky enough to have him.

A Greater Need: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 33

Before Valentine’s Day

Some years I really like Valentine’s Day and some years it leaves me lukewarm. It’s not like Halloween, which consistently delights, or Christmas, which can make the whole month before seem cheerful. This year, though, I guess we all needed it. Ten days before the holiday, Beth went to the grocery store. Part of her mission was to pick up some heart-shaped boxes of chocolates for North’s three best friends—Zoë, Miles, and Maddie. While she was in the candy section, she picked up a rainbow-striped box of chocolates for me, and gave it to me as soon as she got home.

It had six pieces. I picked the two most unusual—Roman nougat and molasses chew– to eat right away. I had to look up what Roman nougat is, so there would be no surprises—it’s cherry with nuts. I recommend it, if you’re not one of those anti-nougat people. I offered Beth the chocolate cream, but she declined, so I had it the next day with the coconut cream. I gave Noah the caramel and North the vanilla cream, because I was feeling generous.

We were all full of Valentine’s plans, more than a week before the holiday. Sunday is Beth’s cooking night and she wanted to make a special dinner, though she hadn’t decided what to cook yet. North volunteered that Valentine’s Day dinner is often a tomato-based soup and grilled cheese cut into heart shapes. I said I thought Beth might have something fancier in mind and Noah said, “What could be fancier than heart-shaped grilled cheese?”

Inspired, I think, by the pretty pink-frosted cookies my blog friend Nicole makes every Valentine’s Day (Hi, Nicole!), I was planning to make heart-shaped sugar cookies with pink frosting. North said they wanted to help. I posted on Facebook that it seemed we had “a greater need of Valentine’s Day than usual.” And who wouldn’t, after eleven months of semi-quarantine? Beth also has some pent-up snow frustration, I think, because she wants more snow and less sleet and freezing rain, which she considers “a waste of precipitation.”

At the end of my last post, I mentioned there was a chance of snow for six out of the next nine days, and it so happens it’s been exactly nine days since then. Well, we didn’t get six days of snow. We had a half-inch of slushy snow on Wednesday and an ice storm on Saturday, and that’s not counting whatever fell while we were asleep or not looking, because often it did look as if something wet had fallen from the sky but it was hard to say exactly what.

The ice storm was pretty, though. Everything in our yard was encased in ice. I knew it would melt quickly, so I suggested to our resident photographer that he go out and take some pictures of it and he did, even though it was sleeting. I didn’t think I’d have to go out in the messy weather, but just as North and I were getting started on the cookie dough, I noticed we’d caught a mouse in one of the humane traps in the lazy Susan. Its tail had gotten stuck in the door and it was struggling, so I didn’t think I could in good conscience set the trap on the porch and go release its occupant later. I left North to finish the dough, pulled on my boots, grabbed my umbrella, walked down to the creek, crossed the bridge, and walked a little bit into the woods where I released it into some dry leaves in a hollow under a stump. I left the peanut-butter smeared crackers that had lured it into the trap there, too, because North thinks that’s only fair. On my way back, I noticed the first crocuses I’d seen in bloom this year, closed, but poking up out of the icy grass.

The dough had to refrigerate for two hours, but we managed to get the cookies cut, baked, and frosted by three-thirty, at which point Noah and I watched The Shining. We’d read the book over Christmas break, so it was fun to see the (very different) film version, especially on a day of wintry, if not snowy, weather. He told me the song played in the opening sequence, “Dies Irae,” is often used to signify death in film because it’s played at funerals, and then he wondered if the overhead shots of the car on the mountain road were taken with a drone, because 1980 seemed too early for drones, but the shots looked too close for a helicopter. ( I looked it up. It was a helicopter.)

Noah and I made dinner—pasta with a turmeric cream sauce and a salad—and talked more about the film. I contrasted the characterizations and symbolism in the novel and film versions. I used to teach the novel, so I had a lot to say and he was a good listener. After dinner, the four of us finished watching 9 to 5, which we’d started the night before. North was continually surprised by the lawlessness of the main characters.

It was a nice day, with one-on-one time with both kids, and some family time, too. It was marred only by the Senate acquitting former President Trump in the impeachment trial. I mean, I wasn’t surprised or anything, but it’s still galling. I really wouldn’t care if I thought he was just going to crawl under a rock and never be heard from again, but I’m not counting on that. Can I say, though, how proud I am to be Representative Jamie Raskin’s constituent?

Valentine’s Day

The big day was Sunday. Beth left to go grocery shopping before both kids were up, so we decided to exchange gifts after lunch. Our usual Valentine’s Day protocol is that Beth and I get each other presents and we also get presents for the kids and the kids get a gift, usually food, for the whole family. It ended up being a festival of chocolate. I got chocolate caramels for Beth and she got me ganache-filled chocolate hearts. We got chocolate frogs for North and chocolate-covered almonds for Noah. Noah got the family two loaves of bread, one sourdough, and one chocolate sourdough. He suggested we freeze the chocolate sourdough loaf so when we finally finish all the chocolate we won’t have to be sad because there will be more. It seemed like a good idea.

Even Xander got some cat treats, because we celebrated his eighteenth birthday on Valentine’s Day. We don’t know the exact day of his birth, but the shelter said he came from a mid-February litter and at some point North decided his birthday should be Valentine’s Day.

After the gift exchange, Beth drove North to deliver baggies of heart cookies and boxes of chocolate to their friends and they had a short, outside visit with Miles and Maddie. I took advantage of the relatively empty house to take a nap because I hadn’t slept well the night before and I was tired. The nap was short but restorative. Beth got home just as I was waking up and she told me, laughing, that the twins had made a pan of brownies for North. You might think more chocolate was the last thing we needed, but I, for one, was not going to say no. I had one, and it was gooey and good.

I had a nice talk with my mom in the late afternoon. She’d gotten her first vaccination the day before. We capped off the day with a tasty Lunar New Year’s-themed dinner Beth made, consisting of a tofu and vegetable stir-fry on curly noodles and shiitake mushrooms braised in oyster sauce and then Beth, Noah, and I watched an episode of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, which we do every Sunday now, much to my delight. While we watched, North was baking little chocolate lava cakes with powdered sugar hearts on them. It was their gift to the family and we ate them all together. It was a very satisfying Valentine’s Day, and just what we needed.

A Goodbye: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 13

On Friday morning around eight, North found our cat Matthew lying on the living room floor near the front door, half-paralyzed and crying in distress. We were all quite surprised because the day before he’d seemed perfectly normal, but now he had no control over his back legs. The first thing that came to mind was that he had type 1 diabetes and this was exactly how it first presented when he was about a year old. We’d just switched him and his brother Xander from high-protein kitten food to regular cat food and one day his legs just gave out and he collapsed onto the kitchen floor. After some short-term insulin, we got him on food for cats with diabetes and he never needed any more insulin or diabetes medicine. At the time, the vet told us as he got older, the special food might not do the trick anymore and then he’d need to go on insulin. That was sixteen years ago, so I thought that the time had finally come for more aggressive treatment.

We carried him to our bed, which is his favorite place, and brought him some water, which he drank, and for the next few hours, we took turns sitting with him alone or in various combinations. He seemed to calm down and stopped crying so much, but every now and then he’d try, unsuccessfully, to stand. Mostly he just lay quietly, breathing more quickly than usual, occasionally napping a little.

Beth was trying to reach the vet’s office but they never picked up the phone so she drove over there to see if there was anything posted on the door about holiday weekend hours. As it turned out, they were closed for the whole day, so she called an animal hospital in the city. It was the same hospital where our first cat, Emily, received treatment at the end of her life and died, eighteen years ago.

After asking a few questions, the staff person at the animal hospital asked us to bring Matthew in. We’d have to leave him in his carrier at the door and they’d take him inside and talk to us by phone as we waited outside. Even though we knew no one was going inside, North and I came along with Beth and Matthew, just in case we knew the answers to any questions, and for moral support. There weren’t many questions, though, and pretty soon after we left him, they told us to go home and said they’d call us.

Late that morning, the vet called with the bad news. It wasn’t his diabetes. It was heart disease, very advanced. They did an ultrasound and found fluid around his heart and lungs. The immediate problem was a blood clot that was preventing him from moving his legs, but his overall prognosis was poor.

We decided to go through with the euthanasia that day. This time all four of us went to the animal hospital. They are putting animals down in the parking garage because of COVID. This sounds really horrible, but they did their best to make a private space. There was a folding screen making a little room out of a corner. It was near a vent blowing cool air, so it wasn’t oppressively hot, and there was a wooden bench with a cushion on it and side tables with boxes of tissues and water.

Only one person was allowed to be there during the procedure, but we were all allowed to visit with him beforehand. The vet brought our loudly meowing cat behind the screen and stepped out, saying we could take as long as we liked and to call her when we were ready. We sat on the bench and petted him and talked to him and kissed the top of his head. He was wrapped up in a white fleece blanket and part of one of his front legs had been shaved, just above the paw, and the port for the drugs was already attached. My heart sank a little further when I saw that.

When we’d said our goodbyes, everyone but me left, and Beth called for the vet to come back from inside the building. I held Matthew while the vet administered the two drugs, the first to render him unconscious and the second one to stop his heart. They took effect more quickly than I thought they would. The vet listened to his chest with a stethoscope and said, “He’s gone.” She told me it had been the compassionate decision. Or at least that’s what I think she said. Between her face shield and her mask and the fact that we were in a garage, it was hard to hear. I just nodded and she asked if I wanted to stay with him for a while and I did. When I finally lay him down on the bench, I found Beth outside and asked her to call someone to come pick him up and I went back to wait with him again because I couldn’t bear to leave his body alone.

It’s three days later and we’re all sad and kind of shocked. One day we thought he was reasonably healthy for a seventeen-year-old cat—his most serious problem seemed to be a tendency toward constipation and some weight loss we thought was due to his digestive issues—and the next day a vet was telling us he was fatally ill.

We spent a quiet fourth of July. The Takoma Park parade and fireworks were cancelled months ago, so our observation of the holiday consisted of watching Hamilton and having a backyard picnic.  And because it was the most patriotic thing I could think to do, I wrote a small batch of postcards, encouraging Florida voters to enroll in the state’s vote by mail program. (I’ve written over a hundred postcards for this campaign alone.)

The next day, Beth, Noah, and I went to another park. We’ve continued to do this every weekend since mid-May and we have yet to repeat a park. The weekend previous we’d been to a charming little creek off the Middle Patuxent, where we could hear what I think was a good-sized bullfrog croaking underneath a mass of submerged tree roots and we could see dozens of these beautiful black-winged, turquoise-bodied dragonflies.

This week we went to South River Farm Park, which as you might guess from the name is on the South River, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. We waded in the salty river and in a little pond (until some kayakers warned us out of it, telling us there were snapping turtles and snakes in there). We saw a Great Blue Heron in the pond, and picked some of the plentiful raspberries we found growing along the trail.

I was sorry North had elected not to come because I think they would have liked it but we weren’t sure whether or not the park had beach access when we set out and they didn’t want to come without knowing for sure. (And actually, this park wasn’t even the one we thought we’d visit. Our first and second choice were filled to capacity and closed.) I was timing how long it took to walk from the parking lot to the water and noting the firmness and slope of the path for future reference. Speaking of North’s condition, after the MRI last week, we learned that they have a herniated disk. It may sound like an odd reaction, but Beth and I were both really happy to learn this because it means there’s a concrete reason for their pain and it should guide the physical therapist’s plan. They already have some at-home exercises to do and they’ll have their first full-length PT session on Thursday.

After we left the park we stopped at a nursery, where I got two dwarf sunflowers and a thyme plant, then we went to a farm stand and got some excellent peaches, peach jam, cantaloupe, and tomatoes. We each ate a sweet, juicy peach in the parking lot before picking up some Chinese takeout for lunch and following it up with frozen custard and Italian ice at Rita’s. It was a nice outing and kind of therapeutic to spend so much time outside.

We brought home some extra fortune cookies and gave one of them to North. It said their luck was about to change.

“That could be good or bad,” I observed, but given that they’ve been on crutches since February, our country’s been in the grip of a pandemic since March, and a cat they loved dearly just died, we decided to read it as a good sign.

RIP, Matthew Simon
Circa February 14, 2003-July 3, 2020

He was a beautiful cat and more than a little neurotic, he loved to play with lanyards, which I think he pretended were snakes, and he was a good mouser, even in old age. We will miss him very much.