Pandemic diaries: the final entry?

 It was a dark and stormy morning. The rain fell steadily, and gusty winds had already turned my umbrella inside-out on the short walk from the parking lot to the glass-fronted entrance of Walmart. Several signs were taped to the glass, and Dave and I paused to read them. There was a notice that hours would be expanded as of June 5, a notice that the pharmacy was offering free Covid shots, and another sign proclaiming that fully vaccinated customers were not required to wear face masks inside, while also strongly recommending that anyone who’d still not been fully immunized should continue wearing a mask.

“What do you think?” I said.

“Let’s go for it,” he said. He took off his mask. So did I. We walked into Walmart with our entire faces on display.

On May 29, 2021, the 14-month-long Massachusetts mask mandate was lifted. Businesses can go back to full capacity.  People still are required to wear masks on public transportation, in healthcare facilities and nursing homes and the like, and if a business still requires that its customers be masked, all are expected to comply. People who aren’t fully vaccinated are urged to keeping wearing masks, but those of us who are fully vaxxed are pretty much free to mingle, barefaced.

We were out of almost everything, so this morning’s shopping trip was going to be pretty big. This is an extra reason we were at Walmart, which is a store that I understand many people find problematic. However, we live in something of a food desert. Compared to the surrounding towns, our Boston suburb has large numbers of immigrants and people of color. We have more people without cars, who have to shop in town. The chain grocery stores here take advantage by charging significantly higher prices for items that go for anywhere from 10 to 30% less in snootier suburbs. And they pay their employees a lower wage than Walmart does. Walmart’s the better of a bad bunch.

Dave went to the Walmart grocery section while I headed for the most crucial item on our list, cat food, which lives in an aisle all the way at the other end of the store. We were almost out of both the wet and the dry stuff, a perilous position indeed. Our orange tabby Capone has made it clear that he finds human flesh—well, at least my flesh—quite a tasty treat. I’ve always hoped that the occasional nibbles he takes at my biceps or toes are affectionate rather than a preliminary taste the judge the quality of the meat, but I’m not taking any chances.

Differences in the store were small but significant. There are still distance markers taped to the floor by the cash registers, but the entrance of the store didn’t require a detour anymore. You could just walk straight in! There were no employees checking for masks. The best change was that all the one-way aisle signs had been taken down. No longer would I have to trek down the dog food corridor in order to enter the cat food aisle traveling in the correct direction. One time, when the cat aisle was empty of other humans, I tried backing into to grab the Fancy Feast, which is near the front, but the guilt of breaking the rule was overwhelming. Extra steps were annoying, but guilt-free.

One-way aisles were always more of a please-do rather than must-do, I suppose, since at least a third of customers ignored them. I found it stressful and annoying when scofflaws breathed their maybe-germs in the direction of my face as we passed in aisle after aisle. “Eff off, Karen,” I’d murmur after we’d passed. “Can’t you read the signs?”

All of the Walmart employees were masked. I imagine that’s going to be true for many stores, and it’s a sensible strategy for workers who have to deal with the public all day. Many of the customers also wore masks. The honor system, working!

 I’m still making my mind up on when to ditch masks indoors. There are a couple of aspects to my reluctance. One is worry that it’s too soon. I remind myself that I’ve been following the experts’ advice throughout the pandemic. Wore the mask, washed my hands, avoided touching my face, kept six feet away. All the things. So if the experts say it’s okay to take off my mask in most places, I should trust that. Over most of May I’ve been slowly acclimating to mask off. We’ve gone to a restaurant (lots of social distance, masks off at the table, masks on everywhere else). I’ve resumed my morning walks and for the past couple of weeks have not worn a mask, not even in my old outdoor go-to way, which was to have the mask strapped onto my ears and around my chin, ready to be stuck onto my face when I came within distance of another pedestrian.

But there’s a bigger drawback to unmasking in public: that other people might think that I’m a Karen. There’ve been so many middle-aged (usually white) women making asses of themselves this past year.  It’s been easy to identify them: they had their masks off and their entitlement on. I didn’t want anyone muttering “Eff you, Karen,” as I passed a little too close in the aisle. So I sidled rather than strutted through the aisles and kept my distance from other customers. This was a relatively simple process, given that it was 7:30 in the morning. I didn’t catch any eye rolls or outright shunning, which was a relief.

 We wheeled the cart into the parking lot and loaded bags into the car. Soon we were headed for home, rain beating on the windshield, the radio playing the news.

“That was weird,” Dave said.

“How did you feel?”

“To be honest,” he said, “I was uncomfortable mentally and comfortable physically.”

“Same,” I said.

Art and the big sleep

I was looking for something light and funny, so I used my library app to download Death Wins a Goldfish, a short graphic novel by Brian Rea. Death works in an office building with many other Deaths, and this particular Death, having never taken a day off, is ordered to use his accumulated vacation time by the Human Resources department. Death makes a list of things he could do on his sabbatical (my kind of guy!) and tries them, writing his reactions in a journal. He goes skiing, he tries a dating app, he collects snow globes, he goes to amusement parks, school, the gym, the beach, etc. He wins the titular goldfish at a carnival and takes good care of it. Eventually he returns to his cubicle, refreshed, with the goldfish and other souvenirs. The drawings are generally in a simple cartoon style—except for one. Death goes to a museum and contemplates a painting. The painting is reproduced in careful and exquisite detail.

It’s a picture of a man, his head wrapped in a sort of turban, in a bathtub. The man’s arm hangs over the side of the tub, a quill pen drooping from his fingers. There’s a wound in his chest and a bloody knife on the floor. There’s a table next to the tub, and some kind of cover over most of the tub, making an ersatz desk. Jean-Paul Marat, French journalist and revolutionary, has just been murdered in his bath by Charlotte Corday.

Here’s the cool part: I had just learned about this painting (The Death of Marat, by Jacques-Louis David, 1793). I’ve been taking an online art history course so that I can have stuff to think about at night—rather than that incident during fourth grade recess or the thousands of other regrets that wake me up, shuddering, as I’m finally dozing off. Also so that I can say more about a painting than “nice colors” or “I wish I had a bathtub-desk.” As it happened, I had watched a lecture on David and this painting literally the day before starting Rea’s book.

I felt a rush of delighted recognition. It was a pleasure to understand more of a reference than what I would have gotten a few days before, which would have been something like “one of the places that Death visits is an art museum.”

The painter David, who had visited Marat in his apartment the day before the murder, uses his formidable technique to portray his friend as a martyr. The body is idealized, with no indication of the skin condition that required Marat to work from his bathtub, and a beam of light illuminates Marat’s peaceful face. But in the French Revolution’s bloodiest phase, headed by Maximilien Robespierre and known as the Reign of Terror, Marat was prominently involved. As was David, who sat on the committee that sentenced the French king, along with many others, to death. This painting was initially popular, but then Robespierre was deposed and executed. David was himself prosecuted for his actions during the Terror and spent time in prison. A few years later he found favor under Napoleon. Then the Bourbons reclaimed power and David was exiled, spending the rest of his life in Belgium and the Netherlands.

The curse of interesting times. I enjoyed learning a bit more about the French Revolution in the course of reading about the painting and David. My world history courses in high school didn’t spend much time on the specifics of the era, though I’ve read some fiction set during this period. They were the best of novels; they were the worst of novels…And I’ve seen some movies. I’m afraid that my country may be tumbling towards something similar at the moment, so my next download on the library app will be from the French History section.

Sometimes I feel remorseful about not having learned some of this stuff sooner, but that would be a silly item to add to the list that keeps sleep at bay. The Death of Marat lecture came just in time to be fresh in my mind while I read the book, which made me curious about the context, which then gave shape to some fuzzy thoughts about politics, history, martyrs and villains. I’ve wandered far from light and funny, but I’m still in the realm of delight.

The bird not chosen

It’s classic American lore that founding father Ben Franklin disapproved of the choice to feature the bald eagle on the National Seal in 1782. He had been a member of one of the three committees tasked with coming up with a design, none of the them quite hitting the mark. Eventually Charles Thomson, secretary of the Congress, combined various features of the proposals and swapped in a bald eagle for a golden eagle. The eagle was chosen as a reference to the Roman Republic and, I suspect, for cosmetic reasons.

The bald eagle (using an older meaning of bald, which is “white-headed”) has stern, noble features. It’s a handsome bird, one of the largest on the continent. The turkey, on the other hand, though also a large bird, isn’t nearly as imposing. Turkeys have the wizened face of a maiden aunt in her 90s. With a terrible cold. Eagles soar among the clouds. Turkeys, though they can fly, are mostly earthbound. On the down side, the eagle has a weak, thin cry compared to the turkey’s full-throated gobble. The cries associated with eagles on film are usually overdubs of the red-tailed hawk’s more virile phonations. Also, nowhere on the eagle’s body is anything as colorful or amusing as a turkey’s snood.

Franklin isn’t known to have argued against the eagle back in 1782, but in 1784 he wrote a letter to his daughter stating “For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly.” By that he meant that, while the bald eagle can and does hunt for the fish and small mammals that form the majority of its diet, this bird is also known to grab prey from the talons of smaller birds. Franklin also accuses the eagle of cowardice, capable of being driven away by a kingbird less than a tenth its size. I was amazed to learn that this is absolutely true. A kingbird will peck at an eagle’s head, and the eagle doesn’t like it.

 Back when I was a kid in Virginia, bald eagles weren’t flying above us and wild turkeys weren’t roaming the streets. Hunting and habitat destruction had greatly reduced both populations. However, thanks to conservationists’ efforts beginning in the mid twentieth century, both eagles and wild turkeys are flourishing in the 2020s. My childhood ideas of a turkey came from from cartoons featuring Turkey Lurkey, the frozen carcasses in the meat section of the grocery store, and holiday drawings made around the outline of my hand. I’d seen a bald eagle at the zoo.  He sat alone on a twenty-foot-high post. He looked as though deep in thought. In the symbology debate, I was on the eagle’s side.

 I’m not sure I’d have been convinced by Franklin’s arguments. “In Truth,” he wrote, “the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America.” (The bald eagle is also native to America.) “He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.” Also—though Franklin never quite comes out and says this—the bird is tastier. Franklin looks as though he’s had more than a few turkey dinners.

In 2021 I see turkeys almost every day, in groups of just a couple to flocks of a couple of dozen. They’re sociable birds. They like our yard, with its oak and cherry trees. Nuts and berries feature significantly in turkey diets. This morning a pair came walking very slowly down our driveway. She was taking her time, and he wasn’t going to hurry her. The male, bald and blue-faced, flared his tail feathers at me and kept watch. I wasn’t wearing a Grenadiers coat, but I kept my distance, a good precaution during mating season.

If I drove about an hour away from the house, towards western Massachusetts, I’d even have a chance of spotting a bald eagle, sitting on a tree top or soaring above a lake. Eagles need big lakes and lots of trees in order to hunt and, in mating season, to construct their enormous nests, which can be up to 10 feet wide. Maybe as things loosen up this summer we’ll go eagle-watching.

Overall, I’ve come to agree with Franklin’s thoughts about the turkey versus eagle thing. Or, I agree to the extent that any such symbol is appropriate; mostly I think designating a national bird is ridiculous. Still, it’s an interesting debate. I wonder whether we’d be quite the same nation if our national seal featured a homely, brave, and gregarious bird rather than a handsome, thieving coward.

Guns and germs

It was a beautiful day. The morning sun shone on lush emerald grass. The dogwoods had taken over from the cherry trees and were in full flower. Birdsong filled the air. The boy sat on the steps outside his home in the Rosemont apartment complex, near a wooden tub planted with flowers. The geese at the nearby pond honked. From his perch the boy could look down at High Street, which passed by his building. A back road to the interstate, High Street was fairly busy around this time of day with trucks bound for the industrial park, a rattling yellow bus carrying kids to the middle school, commuters driving to their jobs. Within the complex people showered, turned on the news, made coffee, walked their dogs, brushed pollen off their windshields. The middle schoolers living at Rosemont started their walks to school.  And some teenagers, throwing long shadows behind them, walked in the boy’s direction.

He raised the gun.

Another Tuesday in America.

My ankle sprain’s mostly healed, so I’m back to taking walks. There’s no better time to be out and about than a bit after the dawn of a May morning. The air’s crisp, the sun’s casting a beautiful glow, and the sidestreets are quiet. Tuesday I was walking through a section where many of the streets are named for those in the Back Bay area of Boston: Exeter, Dartmouth, Arlington, Boylston. Boylston is the longest of these. Unlike Boston’s Boylston Street, which is flat and full of shops, along with Copley Plaza and the main branch of the Boston Public Library,  my town’s Boylston Street winds up a hill and is purely residential, progressing from single-family houses to duplexes, and ending at High Street. I got to the intersection of Boylston and High, about a block away from Rosemont Square, and turned around, heading for home at around 7:15.

At least six shots were fired. Police responded quickly, putting the middle school on lockdown and ordering the nearby residents to shelter in place. I didn’t know about any of this while it was happening. I might even have missed the news entirely, but Dave had a dentist appointment at 10 a.m. and texted me when he saw the story on the waiting room TV.

Rosemont! When Sonny was a toddler, Rosemont was part of many of our walks. Our house was a half mile away, and Rosemont had a pond at its far end. I’d wheel the stroller up the hill, past the neat buildings, four stories each, done up in shades of white, tan, and brown. Sonny would watch the ducks and geese, flapping his arms and kicking his legs. We’d throw pebbles into the water.  Each apartment in the complex had a little balcony, usually stocked with a couple of deck chairs and some potted plants. One of Sonny’s baby-sitters, Farzeen, had lived here. I had a flash vision of her toy-strewn living room with its wall-to-wall beige carpet and sliding glass door. Her husband was doing his medical residency in one the Boston hospitals: a radiologist, or was it an anesthesiologist? We hadn’t kept in touch, and I always assumed that they’d moved to somewhere more upscale eventually. Her kid would be a young man now, Sonny’s age.

By the time Dave texted me, the lockdown and shelter in place orders had been lifted. The police had arrested the boy with the gun, who turned out to be 15 years old. No one one was physically injured, so this was a blip, far from meeting the definition of a mass shooting, the most common requiring that four or more people, excluding the shooter, are injured or slaughtered. The authorities were still looking for the other youths involved, but they had determined that local residents were not in any undue danger.

Other than the memory of ducks and Farzeen—welcome especially in a place where two decades of walks have made things too familiar—my reaction to learning that guns had been fired so close in location and time to my morning walk was basically to wonder why a 15-year-old boy hadn’t been in school that morning. The high school’s homeroom starts at 7:20. And then—I went about my day. Shootings are so common that I have just accepted them as a cost of being out in the world. Is it crazy that I’m more apprehensive about the dangers of taking off my face mask in a couple of weeks, when the mask mandate in my state will be lifted, than being shot during my morning constitutional? Yes. Yes, it is crazy.

Maybe it’s because we’ve had decades to absorb the fact that mass shootings happen and there’s not going to be any meaningful effort to stop them. “Hopes and prayers” haven’t come through. If you want a life that includes movie theaters, places to worship, shopping centers, concerts, schools, parks, and birthday parties, you tuck the figures (194 mass shootings in the first 18 weeks of 2021, or slightly more than 10 per week) in the back of your brain and keep going. In contrast, the pandemic has been a fast-moving, invisible killer. You can’t duck around the corner or call 911, or apply for a license to carry a concealed virus about your person. You can do things to keep yourself somewhat safer, such as wearing masks, getting vaccinated, and avoiding the MAGA-verse.

Time’s a factor. It’s only been about 14 months since the pandemic erupted and everything went to hell. It’s easy to remember the before-times and to have some hope of better after-times, and to be nervous about how and whether we’ll get there. But I can’t remember a time before mass shootings. The ever-present quality makes it easy to see them as inevitable. Seasonal, like an especially snowy winter or a summer heat wave.

A couple of days later and the local news has moved on to more pressing matters. The town police still haven’t located the other kids who were involved in the fight. No physical injuries, could have been worse, etc. I wonder, though, what psychological toll having no safe places takes. Not that absolutely safe places have ever existed, but wouldn’t it be nice to feel safe sometimes, even if that was an illusion?

Submerged in OCEAN

My first mistake was clicking on the personality test link. I know that the results will shake my self confidence for the rest of the day, but also I have clung to the hope that years of efforts to improve my personality have succeeded. I took the Big Five test, also known as OCEAN (or CANOE), which evaluates respondents according to five dimensions: Open-mindedness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Higher scores in the first four traits and lower scores in the fifth are considered to be positive. That is, people who are open-minded, conscientious, outgoing, agreeable, and calm are the best! They’re good leaders. They’re easy to be around. They do well in school. They have long-lasting, stable relationships and strong social supports. They achieve their goals. They’re healthier and likely to live longer. They’re trustworthy.

Experts seem to agree that adult personality is relatively immutable over one’s lifetime. People can make little adjustments, but mostly you’re stuck with what your genetics and early upbringing created. That’s good news for many people, I’m sure. Not such great news for those of us who realized early on that we were the wrong kind of different and have spent years trying to correct the situation. Ah well.

According to various academic studies, people on the autistic spectrum tend to have OCEAN scores that differ significantly from neurotypical people’s in three of the dimensions. We are lower in agreeableness and conscientiousness and higher in neuroticism. In other words: we generally aren’t as likable, shouldn’t be trusted, and for some reason are hella emotional about it.

Let’s see how I did this time, shall we?

Each question had five answers: Strongly disagree, Somewhat disagree, Neutral, Somewhat agree, Strongly agree. It’s relatively easy to see what the ideal responses would be for these questions, but I opted for truth. (Or did I?)

Open-mindedness: 96% (meaning that I was more curious and open to new experiences than 96% of the people who’ve taken the OCEAN test). “You enjoy having novel experiences and seeing things in new ways.” I think the 96% figure may be an overstatement of my actual open-mindedness. So many of the questions were related to things that I enjoy, such as learning concepts, making up stories, or going to plays and museums. None asked about whether I’m eager to go camping (soft no—although glamping sounds interesting),  try bungee jumping (hard no), or eat a salad with dressing on it (hell no). Still, I’ll take a high score on a positive trait, since it was downhill from here.

Conscientiousness: 63%. “You are well-organized and are reliable.” Damned with faint praise, but accurate. I have missed maybe three deadlines over my lifespan. I was grading essays from my hospital bed, two hours after my C section. I’d hoped that this score would be higher, even though my achievement of targets often came at a social cost—I got in trouble when I would ask questions to clarify a task. However, this dimension also encompasses things like neatness and carefulness, and the questions don’t distinguish between commitments to others and oneself. Ten or more abandoned novels, a constant cycle of moderate messiness followed by cleanups, 97 sensible diets ditched within a week or two. Relapsing and remitting. Still, it’s slightly better than expected for someone on the spectrum.

Extraversion: 34%. “You tend to shy away from social situations.” I’m amazed I scored this high. Although I like people just fine, it’s easier for me to interact in smaller or more controlled social situations. Talking to someone in person, one-on-one is usually okay, especially if it’s someone I know. Being in a music rehearsal is great. A small group in a relatively quiet space: I can handle it! But interacting on the phone, or with lots of people in a loud space: “shy away” is what I do.

Agreeableness: 16%. “You find it easy to criticize others.”  The paragraph below further clarifies: “High scorers tend to be good natured, sympathetic, forgiving, courteous; Low scorers tend to be critical, rude, harsh, callous.”  I feel that I’m as sympathetic and courteous as most people, but sometimes I have difficulties with style. Some neurotypical people have told me that my face muscles are defective (“smile!” they order) or my tone of voice is wrong (evidently I don’t say “fine” with enough chirpiness when asked how I am). This sets up a vicious cycle: the harder I smile and chirp, the farther off I get. The questions on the test don’t differentiate between critique that’s solicited and hurtful criticism. If someone asks me for feedback on a story, I’ll respond with what I think are the strengths and weaknesses. Critique is a mental habit due to years of looking to improve as a musician and writer (this essay has too…many…ellipses…). I don’t give unsolicited critiques or go around telling people to change their shirts or rearrange their faces to my personal requirements.

Neuroticism: 98%. Aaaargh. “You are a generally anxious person and tend to worry about things.” Another spectrum tendency, though the 98% score’s dismayingly high. Am I really that much more anxious than other people? Other words associated with my end of this dimension were “nervous, insecure, and high-strung.” A fine cluster indeed. I’ve always rationalized much of my anxiety as arising from the story-telling process. Maybe not.

 In summary, it seems that my OCEAN scores are typical for someone with my kind of brain. I have some new thoughts going, at least. I wonder why awkwardness is defined as disagreeable. Why task expectations can’t be communicated with more patience and clarity. Why humans who have routinely been mocked and bullied because of the way we talk and move are classified as neurotic. It turns out my personality hasn’t changed since the last time I took this test. I’m stuck with myself. My inclination to push back on the interpretation of my results has strengthened, though. Some progress there.

The Nancy Drew hour

I shoved the hangers to the side and shined the flashlight into the back wall. No spiders; smooth  plaster. I decided to started knocking in the middle and go towards the edges. Knock. Knock-knock. “Mom,” said Sonny. ”What are you doing in my closet?”

“Great, another pair of ears! Does that sound hollow—over there, to the left?” Knock knock.

“Um. No.”

“Darn it!” It was my second dead end of the day.

A theater with a Prohibition-era secret tunnel has recently inserted itself into my novel. One of those things that happens. It rekindled an old fascination from my Chicago days with speakeasies and escape routes, especially those associated with my orange tabby’s infamous namesake,  Al Capone. When I took one of the gangster walking tours in Uptown, I learned that Capone would supply his venues, such as the Green Mill jazz club, with liquor delivered via underground tunnels. These tunnels were, rather disappointingly, basically a bunch of interconnected basements rather than the standalone, dirt-walled tunnels of my imagination.

It’s common knowledge that during Prohibition, which lasted nationwide in the US from 1920 through 1933, Americans didn’t stop drinking. They just got sneaky about it, getting doctors’ prescriptions for medicinal doses of brandy, flocking to churches for the communion wine, and sharing recipes for bathtub gin and homemade distilleries. They jammed speakeasies and bought spirits from bootleggers.  During this era, people often built liquor-collection-sized hiding places into their houses, which were accessible via trap doors, sliding bookcases, false cabinet- and closet-backs, spaces underneath floorboards, etc.

 It struck me that I live in a house that was built in 1933. I thought about Scooby Doo, Nancy Drew, Jupiter Jones, the Hardy Boys, and the other kid detectives from my formative years. Those sleuths couldn’t go anywhere without finding smugglers’ caves and secret rooms, revolving fireplaces and the like. I’d lived in a Prohibition-era house for 13 years; surely it must be hiding a secret or two. I grabbed a flashlight and a magnifying glass and set out.

The original owner of our house was a blacksmith. He probably wasn’t a rum-runner in his spare time, but he was a prominent citizen with the means to amass a collection of whiskeys and wines. You’d think that by now we would have explored every corner of our house, but 1) there be spiders in the corners and backs of things, plus 2) it took us more than two years simply to open all of our moving boxes. We’re slow at this stuff.

I started with the built-in cabinet in the dining room where I keep the Christmas candlesticks and other rarely used items. I tapped at the back and sides of the cabinet without finding any hollow sound. There was, however, a mysterious wire running through it, vanishing up towards Sonny’s room on the upper floor and down towards the basement. One of the articles about Prohibition houses mentioned wires leading to hidden stills…

“I have stuff to do in here, Mom.”

I can take a hint and removed myself to the hall linen cabinet, where I began tapping for hollow walls once again. Dave opened his office door. “Could you do that later? I’m on a call.”

I sighed. Above my head was the hatch to the attic. We have no idea what’s up there, since the hatch is painted shut. (As are a couple of windows on the main floor.) Even when we discovered that a bat colony had taken up residence in the attic, the pest control people fixed it from the outside. I wondered if it was worth trying to chip at the paint in order to paw through whatever the bats had left up there. Not while Dave was in his meeting, though.

So I followed the wire down to the basement, where it vanished into the space behind the little door.

Unlike the painted-shut windows and attic hatch, the little door (so-called because it’s only about four feet high) has a sliding latch that’s been painted open. We have to lean an old pair of crutches against the door to keep it shut. The door leads to the cellar, which houses the oil tank. While the basement proper has painted cement block walls, the cellar’s walls are unpainted, a little crumbly in spots, and in one place there are big stones instead of blocks. The only sources of light are a couple of tiny rectangular windows just above ground height. The floor is dirt. Well, dirt mixed with rocks and bricks, forming a mound that rises to hip height on the east end. On top of the earth are old window screens, curtain rods, bags of mortar mix, rope, and a couple of flower pots. Nothing of ours, although technically we acquired it along with the house. Some of it could be stuff dating back to the blacksmith days. There’s room for a couple of crates of whiskey, or a chest of gold doubloons, or even a bootlegger or two in there.

Nancy Drew would surely get out a shovel and start digging, alone or with the help of George, Bess, and Ned. Me, I lost my nerve. I closed the little door and barricaded it once again, saving the mystery of the manor house for some other day.

Ganging aft agley

Dave went shopping the other day for a Mother’s Day feast. There’ll be no restaurant brunch for us this year, or most years. We rarely plan far enough ahead to get a reservation. This holiday is one where, ahead of time, I feel the pressure to conform to the typical moms-who-brunch mode: a lengthy gathering featuring midmorning cocktails, fancy breads, decorative fruits, and thinly sliced meats and cheese. Fancy and vaguely cosmopolitan. I suggested that Dave forage for croissants, chocolate-covered strawberries, macarons, deli meat, and Mimosas.

He came back with Lay’s chips, salsa, razorblades, chocolate chip cookies, frozen hamburgers, orange juice, and vodka. “Aargh,” he said, when I pointed out that OJ plus vodka equals screwdriver, not mimosa. Nothing’s wrong with a Screwdriver, though, we agreed.

I woke up this morning to a down-market reality, having slept the wrong way on my neck and with my ankle still not wanting to bend so that I could walk down stairs like a normal person. I felt much more in the mood for chips and a Screwdriver than croissants and a Mimosa.

Both Mimosas and Screwdrivers were born in the twentieth century. Ad men had successfully promoted orange juice as an essential breakfast item. A kind of vitamin-packed, cold version of coffee. And with the addition of OJ to the first meal of the day, day-drinking seems to have become more popular. Coincidence? Who knows? At any rate, common brunch drinks such as Mimosas, Bloody Marys, and Screwdrivers date to the 1920s and 30s and were quite the hit with the leisured and middle classes. In the early 1920s Malachy McGarry, the bartender at the London club Buck’s, invented a drink composed of two parts champagne to one part orange juice and called it a Buck’s Fizz. In 1925 a bartender at the Paris Ritz Hotel, Frank Meier, rejiggered the proportions of those ingredients to 50/50 and had his own hit. At some point, Meier’s drink was named after the similarly colored mimosa plant.

There are conflicting stories about the Screwdriver’s origins. No champagne for the U.S. Marines, stuck at sea for months on end, or the Americans working oil rigs in the Persian Gulf. The stories imply a more working-class beverage, no bartender required. Just tip a little vodka into the morning orange juice and stir it with the tools on hand (as legend has it, an actual screwdriver) and voila! a cocktail that energizes and relaxes in equal measure which can be consumed right under the boss’s nose! As someone who’s occasionally stirred a drink with a handy but inappropriate tool—in my case, a ballpoint pen—I can relate. Even the stories associating Screwdrivers with hotels have a déclassé feel. A 1949 article in Time Magazine depicts seedy diplomats enjoying these cocktails in the bar of the Istanbul Park Hotel. Far removed from Buck’s or the Ritz.

Dave’s haul also reflected some serendipitous screwups of the past. In 1930, innkeeper Ruth Graves Wakefield added semisweet chocolate shavings to her chocolate cookie dough after running out of baker’s chocolate. The result: the chocolate chip cookie. In 1853, after a finicky customer sent back his fried potatoes, saying they needed to be crispier, chef George Crum erupted. I’ll show him crispy! He cut a potato into thin paper-thin slices, fried them hard, then over-salted them. Aiming for inedible, he produced the incredible: the first potato chips.

Over the years I’ve come almost to prefer it when things don’t go exactly to plan. My plans are the size of my imagination; adding an obstacle stretches them in interesting ways. I’ve achieved nothing as globally significant as the accidents of penicillin, the microwave oven, X-rays, vulcanized rubber, the Margarita (a Manhattan bartender misremembered a cocktail recipe and using tequila instead of whiskey), or the ice cream cone (a waffle-seller helping out an ice cream vendor who’d run out of serving bowls at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair). On the other hand, my accidents haven’t been as terrible as tofu, either. Hooray for Screwdrivers, burgers, Lays’, chocolate chip cookies and other happy screw-ups.

Die Ohrwuermer

Recently I made a playlist titled “rev up” that was designed to lift my mood and get me excited about moving. I sprained my ankle a couple of weeks ago and have been way more sedentary than I’d like and cranky than my family’d like. A lot of the songs are up-tempo numbers from the ‘70s and ‘80s, along with some ‘90s hits and a few tunes from the 2000s. Besides reminding me of my days teaching aerobics, the songs trigger cheerful memories of hanging out on the North Avenue Beach with my friends, watching the sailboats on Lake Michigan, a transistor radio tuned to a Top 40 station. It’s always summer or a six-thirty high impact class in a gym during these flashbacks. Many of the songs are good; some are on the cheesy side but make it onto the playlist for a great brass riff or a beat that fits perfectly with jumping jacks. Not that I should be doing them now, with the ankle and all, but that beat still evokes the sheer physical elation I got from jumping jacks, back in the day.

I listened to the playlist a few times and discovered that some of the songs hadn’t aged well. So I deleted them, but bits of the worst stayed stuck in my head. I’d sowed a crop of malignant earworms and needed an exterminator, stat!

The word earworm, in the sense of a musical fragment that keeps repeating in your head, is of German origin (ohrwurm) and around a century old. Wikipedia classifies the earworm as a form of ”involuntary cognition,” meaning a memory that’s activated by environmental or sensory cues instead of a conscious effort to remember. Think Proust and his madeleines. Up to 98% of people are reported to experience earworms, although for some reason in women they tend to be longer lasting and to be perceived as more annoying.

I have some musical phrase going through my head more often than not, and I generally find this pleasant, or at least useful. Frequently it’s a phrase from a piece that I’m learning or have just performed, and I see it as my brain processing a tricky spot. After I’d edited the playlist, the bad boys started to fade, only to be replaced by a bunch of equally irksome earworms courtesy of Sonny. Sonny’s always been drawn to “old songs” (to him, this means music of the ‘70s and ‘80s), and he also loves list videos and snarky videos. Recently he’s taken to playing these videos on the TV in the family room around dinner time. Our kitchen is adjacent to the family room, so I’ve been making dinner to “Top 100 songs of the Disco Era” and the like. I think that I’m focusing on boiling water and chopping things, but somehow songs I never cared for sneak onto the repeat cycle in my head. Boogie Wonderland. Eye of the Tiger. I’ve Got You Babe. Escape (the Pina Colada song).  The Macarena. Ayiiiee!

Ohrwurm’s original meaning in German is “earwig,” referring to a nocturnal insect that feeds on plants and other bugs and is found on every continent but Antarctica. Several origins are suggested for this word, including that in Roman times these insects were ground up and used to treat ear ailments. Another speculation is that earwigs’ hindwings have an ear-like appearance. The sources I found insisted that the word earwig has nothing, nothing at all! to do with the folk tales that suggest that these insects are eager to climb into humans’ ear canals in order to burrow into our brains and lay their eggs. No matter what your counselor may have said by the campfire that night when you were nine, earwigs are not bent upon carrying out a hideous revenge for the Romans’ medical practices. I can only hope that the experts are right.

When I have an earworm, however, it does sometimes feel like I’m hosting a vengeful spirit. Another of Sonny’s dinnertime favorites is “Trainwreckords.” This series is about albums that derailed a once-successful artist’s career, and it features some hauntingly terrible songs. Intuition. Mr. Roboto. Blurred Lines. Kokomo. Bam! they go, straight into my skull.

Fortunately there’s plenty of advice for dealing with earworms. The number one suggestion is to listen to the whole song. For some of these tunes, that cure may be worse than the disease. The entirety of I’ve Got You, Babe? Also, what if that hatches a worm from a different part of the song? Other tips include 1) engaging in an activity that involves working memory, like a Sudoku puzzles, reading, watching TV, or having a conversation, 2) chewing gum, 3) turning to a “cure” song like Happy Birthday, or 4) letting time take care of it, since most earworms don’t last all that long.

 The ankle’s getting better, slowly. If none of the remedies works, I’ll try my own idea: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. I’ll boogy down to Kokomo, Pina Colada in hand, singing “I’ve got you, Babe.”

A couple of cold ones

It was a sunny spring afternoon after days of clouds and rain. We drove down Wood Road, a thoroughfare with bipolar surroundings. The road itself was lined on both sides with brick buildings containing medical offices, dotcoms, insurance agencies, printers, signmakers, and such, plus a furniture store and a couple of motels. A typical business zone. Cars whizzed down highway I93 to the right of us; to the left were the tranquil green spaces of the Blue Hills reservation. “There’s the food truck,” said Dave. “We’re here.”  My stomach fluttered. Some kind of emotion was announcing itself.

The three of us (Dave, Sonny, and me) were going out to eat together for the first time in six months. Back in October we’d dined al fresco to celebrate Sonny’s twenty-third birthday. Now, for the first time in more than a year, we were going to an indoor restaurant. I’d made a 3:45 reservation for a table in the taproom of the Widowmaker Brewing Co.

We arrived about five minutes early, but the hostess showed us to a table immediately and explained how to access and order from the menus (no physical menus here, just scan codes with links). The space was cavernous and industrial. Tall, looming steel tanks in the back, pipes running overhead. There were warm touches, too: barrel-based, wood-topped tables, colorful columns, soft gray walls, and a long, low bar. The place was fairly busy for a mid Saturday afternoon. The beer garden in front was full. In the taproom, all of the tables in the front section were occupied with parties of two to five or six people. There was a dog at every fourth table or so.

We were seated towards the back, near a garage door-sized window. It was open and let in a light, warm breeze. The brewery’s website had mentioned its Covid-19 restrictions, which included mandatory reservations for the taproom, masks required when not seated at the table, and a 90-minute time limit per table. Every table had a sample-sized bottle of hand sanitizer.

Once the hostess had departed, we arranged our knees around the barrel and took off our masks. Indoors, in a public space! Thanks to vaccinations, it didn’t feel that scary. I’m three weeks past my Johnson & Johnson one-and-done shot, and Dave and Sonny have had their first Pfizer shots. Vaccination rates are pretty high in this state. While Massachusetts had a dismal start to its vax program, at present more than a third of us (2.5 million of  7.1 million people) have been fully vaccinated, and more than six million total shots have been doled out.

We scanned the beer list, picked likely candidates from the eight brews on tap, ordered quesadillas from the food truck, breathed fearlessly, and absorbed our surroundings. It felt like a water reflection as opposed to a mirror: a ripply reproduction. The murmur of conversations, servers walking briskly from the table to the bar, empty glasses being whisked off of the tables. But no menus, no napkins or water glasses, no one table-hopping, people in groups but not mingling. Everyone in the joint following the rules and wearing masks while away from the table, the biggest ripple of the bunch.

I saw some interesting masks. I won’t miss wearing the things, if we ever get to that point, but I’ve begun to enjoy masks that make fashion statements. Mine was a tan creation with little flowers. I especially love a man in a colorful mask. Because of my nearsightedness, plus social distance, I often process this visually as a beard, and I’ve begun to long for a colorful-beards trend. Picture it: your brother, husband, the guy down the street, rocking a neon green circle beard, a rainbow lumberjack, a tie-dye Vandyke, or a lavender corporate beard…It probably won’t happen in my lifetime, but a girl can dream. There was a pleasing absence of maskholes demanding that their nether faces be on constant display.

The beers arrived and were tasty; the quesadillas, likewise. We people-watched and talked. There’s something extra fun about the conversations we have in restaurants; they go different places than our talks at home. Sonny took pictures for his Instagram. The afternoon felt almost normal, mundane, when I focused close on my surroundings, shutting out the pandemic on one side and the ghost-memories whizzing by at 2019 speeds on the other.