I Trained for This

Just imagine:  The average American rolls out of bed one random morning, slips on shorts and sneakers, and sets out to run a marathon.  With no training.  That’s the task facing at least a third of the U.S. population (the fraction grows daily) who have been asked (or told) to stay-at-home to avoid catching or transferring the coronavirus.  People are inevitably impatient and anxious.  We are abandoning normal, busy lives to run a race, with most of us forced to run in place.  Are we making progress?  How do we tell?  Are we at mile 1 or 5 or 10?  There are no mile markers.  We can be certain only that we are nowhere near mile 26.  Yet, we yearn to reach the end where we can return to normal, but normal in our future may be nothing more than a mirage.

The novel coronavirus did not exist in humans when I was growing up in rural West Virginia in the 1960s.  But lessons learned from that time long-ago serve me well today, as I live under a stay-at-home order, recognizing that I am in that higher risk population of individuals over the age of 60.

Back then, outside of the school term, my family and I—Mother, Daddy, and I—spent a lot of time socially distanced from others.  We lived well outside of a small town.  We had no neighbors nearby.  Not having an automobile, we went to town “for essential services,” as we now say.  Grocery shopping, say, once a month.  Much of our food came from the garden my folks grew every summer.

Of course, my childhood preceded the invention of the Internet, and most definitely before the invention of social media, and my family didn’t even have a telephone, that social media instrument of the time.  There was no cable television.  Instead, we watched the local news on the one national broadcast channel that we usually got.  We weren’t completely cut off from the world.  Dinner table conversation often revolved around current events.

I had no friends who lived nearby and, again, the lack of transportation kept us socially isolated.  During the months of summer vacation when I would literally never see friends from school, we would write letters that would be speedily delivered back and forth by the reliable Postal Service.  Stamps must have been cheap back then because even my family could afford them.  Of course, there was no email.

For entertainment, I had occasional visits to the local public library, which was never crowded.  That library served the one high school in the county but stayed open in the summer because it served the community too.  I spent my summers reading nearly everything in my small-town library’s collection about World War II and the Great Depression.

Those summers were 50+ years ago.  Yet, I still carry one vivid memory of history as told in Dwight D. Eisenhower’s brick of a memoir.  He began his personal story of WWII by listing the specific numbers of weapons, ships, airplanes, and other essential war materiale in existence for the U.S. armed forces before Pearl Harbor.  And then he told the story of how the production capacity of the United States of America ramped up from such meager beginnings into supplying history’s most fearsome and successful allied forces in order to defeat the original Axis of Evil—Japan, Italy, and Nazi Germany—in a mere 4 years.  The opposite of beating swords into plowshares, it required converting virtually all production of consumer goods—washing machines and automobiles and radios and refrigerators—into military production for the defense of the U.S. and the civilized world.

This memory returns to me today when our health care system is desperate for the most basic supplies to protect health care workers and care for COVID-19 patients.  It is one more reminder that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  But I digress.

In our social isolation, my family also did family stuff.  When I didn't have my nose in a book (as my Mother would say), we played cards, dominoes (a great way to learn arithmetic), watched TV.

We lived beside a little river and Daddy loved to fish, so he and I would often go out in our old, semi-leaky john boat, he in one end and I in the other, at least six feet apart.  In the stern, I paddled the boat.  In the bow, Daddy cast and reeled in the colorful lures designed for bass and whatever other fish might be attracted by the plop-plops and pop-pops the lures made as they hit and traveled through the water.  Unlike Daddy, I found fishing kind of boring—it is impossible to read a book and paddle a boat at the same time—and unproductive.  Usually, there was a lot more fishing than catching going on.  I never fully understood Daddy’s pure contentment with fishing, a contentment that never seemed to vary whether we had fish for dinner or not.  In retrospect, I realize the best part of these fishing excursions for me was spending time with Daddy, who alternated between castigating me for paddling too fast past the good spots and praising me for my superior paddling ability.

Those were good times.  That was also my experience with social isolation in the age of rural poverty, circa 1960s.  Rather idyllic.  Except for the poverty part, of course.

It’s not like that anymore, in the age of coronavirus.

I am retired and I live alone with a little dog and two kitties.  I love living alone, but now I wonder more than usual about what would happen if I got sick.  Mitigating those fears is the fact that I now live in a town with a University medical school, a fine medical center, and extraordinary healthcare access compared with where I used to live.  I have established relationships with providers even though I have lived here less than two years.

All the libraries are closed, but I can download books for free in digital form.  I can’t imagine living without broadband, but I also recognize that many people in rural America still lack any Internet access.  I keep in touch with local friends and those clear across the continent by social media and various communication apps.  Long distance, which used to be a luxury paid for by the minute, is now gloriously free.  I am a voracious consumer of news, which the Internet and cable TV bring me in mind-blowing quantities 24/7.

I still carry Depression mentality behaviors.  My cupboard is stocked to the gills with non-perishables, but that is no change from the days before the stay-at-home order.  The fridge and freezer stock is renewed perhaps twice a month.  I have a car.  I do make an explicit risk-benefit calculation for myself before any trip for “essential services.”

I marvel at the impatience I observe from others about how long this stay-at-home order and social distancing thing might last.  By nature, I am an impatient person, but I am not particularly impatient about this.

Initially, I found myself becoming impatient with the impatience I was observing in others (mostly on social media).  “Why are they so impatient?” I wondered.  “Get over it!” I thought.  And then, I stepped back to reflect on what I could control and I asked myself, “Why am I not so impatient when others are?”

Upon reflection, I realize I have it better than many.  That is a privilege.  My dog and kitties supply cuddly companionship every single day and night.  For once, being retired and living on a fixed income is a positive.  I am not an essential worker who has to put my life on the line every day to work in a grocery store or provide health care services.  I am not a first responder or any type of essential worker.  I am not a displaced worker who has lost a job and income but still have to pay rent and feed a family.  I can stay at home and still cover my expenses and feed my family.  Let me emphasize, that is a privilege.

All that is so, but it still seemed to be an incomplete answer.  Then, in my solitude, the answer came.  In addition to the benefits I enjoy, I am simply well equipped to run this marathon.  This is not unfamiliar territory for me.  I trained for this.