Lockdown, Part Five - Bandara's Plight

Government curfew, Day 33.

The doorbell rang. That's been happening more frequently. Sometimes, it is a delivery of groceries. Most of the time, it is a panhandler. The government curfew has been especially hard on the most vulnerable. I give when I can, mostly away from the house, from the car at intersections. I usually don't give from the home for the simple reason I don't want to encourage them to come back.

I opened the front door and went to the gate. A man with a handkerchief over his mouth was holding his drivers license out to me.

"I am a driver," he told me. "For a family." He waved down the street. "I want to buy rice."

"What is your name?" I asked him.

He showed me his license again. Four incredibly long names, ending in "Bandara".

He asked for 200 rupees, the equivalent of one U.S. dollar, to buy lunch. He said he would pay me back after 6:00, presumably when he got paid.

I retreated into the house, returned with a 1,000 rupee note, and handed it to him through the metal grate of the gate.

When I came back inside, I found Clementine on the computer googling pictures of doughnuts. There isn't a doughnut shop in Colombo, so the government curfew has no effect on her access to doughnuts though she makes it seem like it is the fault of the lockdown.

When I received an order of fruits and vegetables a short time later, a woman dressed in little more than rags, a surgical mask across her mouth, shaking her clasped hands at me in semblance of prayer or mercy, staggered toward the tail gate of the car delivering the groceries. I hesitated to give her a handout, but asked myself how I couldn't.

The day after Peter appeared in the living room, proudly holding a snapper by the tail he and Elise had bought from the back of a fishmonger's truck, I cleaned the fish. Inexpertly with a dull knife, but I got the job done. Then made a beer batter and fried fish . We are well that night. Elise and Sam made both corn and flour tortillas while Pete, Clementine, and I had gone for a swim. Fish tacos with a pineapple salsa, cabbage slaw, and sriacha mayo. At least we're eating well during the lockdown.

The rains have returned. Just in time. I had heard the month of May would mark the beginning of a second monsoon season. A thunderstorm last night knocked out power on our block, plunging the house in darkness. The generator kicked on, but alas no light.

The facilities team came the next afternoon to replace an electrical switch. They would have to switch the power off again in order to enact the repair. Five Sri Lankan electricians spent the next three hours hiding in the garage as a new wave of thunderclouds roiled the dusk sky and I carefully measured out the ingredients to a cosmopolitan up for Elise in the kitchen by the meager flashlight ony phone, attempting to hold the phone in one hand and the jigger in the other.

Bandara didn't return. I am persuaded the thunderstorm kept him from coming back to return the money I loaned him. Elise laughed at my eternal faith in humanity.

Lockdown, Part Four - The Pelican Feather

Government curfew, Day 30.

The morning perusal of internet headlines brought news of partial lifting of curfews in many parts of the island beginning tomorrow at 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. These daily breaks in the lockdown will not come to six metropolitan areas, including Colombo. For now, we remain under an indefinite lockdown.

The easing of curfews seems unrelated to a slowing in the spread of the coronavirus and more to do with providing economic relief to the most vulnerable. After several weeks of watching the same debate play out in the U.S., I inch closer to understanding on which side of the fence I fall and what governments' role in this complicated calculation should be.

Rather than finding comfort in that fact the government is striving to bring normalcy, I find myself apprehensive without knowing exactly why. The reason may be as simple as another change. Just when we were getting used to living in lockdown, a lifting of the same lockdown will bring another new routine.

I shared these apprehensions with Elise, finding it hard to say why not being confined to the house would make me uneasy. It's been a nice break. Telework is not easy, but once you embrace the lack of efficiency and, more importantly, your office doesn't fault you for a lack of efficiency, it's hard not to like not commuting, not having to shave or shower, getting to wear shorts all day long, and working at the dining room table beside Peter and Clementine.

I enjoy the quiet streets and wonder why anyone would want to go back to the how hectic it was before. The skies are bluer than they have ever been, unbelievably blue. Sam and I were driving back from his friends' apartment building, by the park in the middle of the city, when we were buzzed by a squadron of white egrets in fighter jet formation, fifteen or more birds each at least six feet tall a few feet off the ground. The next morning, we found a pelican feather in our yard.

I would like to think there is more to my apprehension than not wanting to go back to work. I definitely don't want to go back with the school still closed and the kids home, continuing online learning. Though I am not very good at helping them navigate their school day, I can make lunch and spell Elise when she is feeling overwhelmed. Keeping three kids focussed on three separate online lesson plans is a lot. I'm not a healthcare professional nor an economist and though I haven't been following the course of the pandemic as closely as others, while the number of cases still grows, I question the wisdom of opening society back up for business as usual. But I'm fortunate enough not to live paycheck to paycheck, so that easy for me to say.

It took five weeks, but every single Lego we own is now on the floor of the upstairsplay room. Sam spent every minute of daylight yesterday sorting through and building Legos.

I crashed on the couch this afternoon. After Clementine got done with her lessons, I somehow convinced her to lay down on my chest. She hadn't slept like that since she was a tiny baby and I held her like a running back carrying a football across the goal line. I didn't expect it, but she drifted off. We both did, dozing fitfully until Elise came downstairs to announce a seafood truck had parked across the street in front of the house. She and Peter went out to investigate and returned with a kilo of prawns and a snapper, Peter holding the decent-sized fish by the tail as though returning from a morning on the high seas.

Oh...and he is also teaching himself how to play the piano.

Lockdown, Part Three - A Long December

Government curfew, Day 21.

We've entered the third week of the island-wide government-imposed curfew. Not much has changed in a week, but the week has given us more time to reflect.

"The smell of hospitals in winter

And the feeling that it's all a lot of oysters, but no pearls"

I don't think often about global civilization. I'm usually way too busy -- as we all are -- caught in the net of our daily routines. But if one ever imagined what it would be like if the entire world just... stopped. Would it be much different than this? If the entire planet just paused. Didn't go anywhere. Didn't go to the airport and fly or pick up visiting relatives, or the dry cleaners to pick up pressed shirts for the week, or to weekly softball games, or to the bar for a quick round before heading home. If the entire world just...paused for a minute. Or a week. Or a month.

Elise found the following brilliant article by Julio Vincent Gambuno that talks about the Great Pause and what comes after. I think we all want things to go back to "normal" when this is all over, but the longer the pause goes on, the less likely "normal" will be the same as it was before. And the more time we have to reflect on what normal means, the more likely we may be to decide that's not what we want after all. Many are surrounded by sickness, death, and fear. But for most, we're just waiting, looking to make sense of this time in our lives, and what should come after it. If you are looking for a silver lining in all of this, this pause may be it.

"All at once you look across a crowded room

To see the way that light attaches to a girl"

I think a lot about the people I'm stuck in this house with and very grateful I love them so much and they mostly tolerate me. I know that is not the case for most people and that makes me sad. I, not surprisingly, have fallen more in love with Elise every day of the past three weeks. My favorite part of each and every day of the last three weeks is waking up next to her in the morning and lying down beside her at night. I know the day the world goes back to normal will be one of the saddest of my life and that day when the kids get back on the school bus to go to school in their classrooms and not at the dining room table and I head off to the office will be heart wrenching.

There have not been moments when it was a little touch and go. It would be impossible not to he stuck in the same house with someone 24/7 and that not be the case, but they are few and far between. Knowing that may not be the case for everyone stuck in the same house together is heartbreaking and scary.

"And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe

Maybe this year will be better than the last

I can't remember all the times I tried to tell my myself

To hold on to these moments as they pass"

I start most days on the treadmill. Elise and I try to make time everyday to exercise. We find new routines. The more time I spend in the kitchen, I start to pine for my restaurant days. Yesterday, I washed lettuce and spinach and ran them through the salad spinner, baked brioche buns from scratch, and carved homemade french fries. Not bad for a day's work.

Sam spent almost six hours at the pool and has the pink on his cheeks to prove it. He's discovered skateboarding, a gift in and of itself.

This morning is Easter, admittedly not one of my favorite holidays. I don't have bad memories of Easter growing up, but I don't particularly have a lot of good ones either. It was always so hot on Easter. And we had to go to church. We got an Easter basket in the morning with a chocolate bunny and a few pieces of candy in plastic eggs -- usually jelly beans and plastic, neon green Easter grass that infiltrated the housr, popping up in unexpected places for the next several months. Easter today, like a lot of things, has become a mass-marketed, materialistic spectacle, more akin to Christmas. I'm hoping this year's paltry candy haul, bereft of toys or the dying of eggs, due entirely on the lack of mail service to Sri Lanka and not by conscious intent, will temper expectations for future Easters to come. We were able to score a chocolate bunny from a local chocolate shop. I had to drive through the deserted city streets and pick it up at the back door of the shop, hidden in an alley, as though I were trying to score a dime bag, but at least the kids had that to wake up to.

As I was finishing up one of my runs this week, Counting Crows' "A Long December" came on. The italicized lyrics above are from that song. Elise and I are the self-professed last living Counting Crows fans, and I found the lyrics expressly applicable to our current situation.

It's been a long March and will likely be an even longer April. Who knows what May will hold? But I do believe the future can be better than the past. There is not a lot of good that came with the virus.

Elise and I both have long histories in the restaurant business. I spent 11 years working in six restaurants. I bussed tables, tended bar, washed dishes, and worked pantry station. Elise and I met waiting tables together. For a lot of reasons, I believe the restaurant industry one of the most important in our country; not just as a means of feeding people, but at its best, a restaurant is an experience, a place to create, and an incubator for wishes and dreams. Every artist, singer, author, photographer, designer, painter, student, or athlete could make money working in a restaurant until they could support themselves following their dreams.

I want my kids to bus and wait tables. To feel the ache in the shoulders and feet after a long Friday night shift and to know how good it feels to give, to bring. To make a dish someone will remember their entire lives or replace a fallen fork before anyone realizes it was missing.

Restaurants are just one of many industries felled by the virus, but though the virus kills and maims, the pause that came with it has to be seen as a gift, a pearl in the oyster. And next year really will be better than the last.

A Letter to My Students as We Face the Pandemic

Elise is our link to the outside world. Due to the nature of my work, I tend to focus more on what's going on inside Sri Lanka, whereas Elise has her finger on the pulse to what's going on outside of Sri Lanka. She does this through a variety of means, one of which is podcasts. 

I don't usually listen to podcasts. Like a lot of things in life, I have trouble finding the time.  Elise is no less busy than I, but she has these cool new ear pods she got for Christmas which allow her to listen to podcasts on the go.  She usually shares the best ones with me.  We listened to them in the car on our drives down the freeway to the beaches in the south of Sri Lanka.  Seems like a lifetime ago. 

In one of the podcasts she shared with me most recently was a letter from writer and Syracuse University professor George Saunders to his fiction writing students when classes were moved off campus in response to the spread of the coronavirus.  It's aimed at writers, but is also relevant to anyone sharing this particular moment in history: 

"Jeez, what a hard and depressing and scary time. So much suffering and anxiety everywhere. (I saw this bee happily buzzing around a flower yesterday and felt like, Moron! If you only knew!) But it also occurs to me that this is when the world needs our eyes and ears and minds. This has never happened before here (at least not since 1918). We are (and especially you are) the generation that is going to have to help us make sense of this and recover afterward. What new forms might you invent, to fictionalize an event like this, where all of the drama is happening in private, essentially? Are you keeping records of the e-mails and texts you’re getting, the thoughts you’re having, the way your hearts and minds are reacting to this strange new way of living? It’s all important. Fifty years from now, people the age you are now won’t believe this ever happened (or will do the sort of eye roll we all do when someone tells us something about some crazy thing that happened in 1970.) What will convince that future kid is what you are able to write about this, and what you’re able to write about it will depend on how much sharp attention you are paying now, and what records you keep.

Also, I think, with how open you can keep your heart. I’m trying to practice feeling something like, “Ah, so this is happening now,” or “Hmm, so this, too, is part of life on Earth. Did not know that, universe. Thanks so much, stinker.”

And then I real quick try to pretend that I didn’t just call the universe a “stinker.”

I did a piece once where I went to live incognito in a homeless camp in Fresno for a week. Very intense, but the best thing I heard in there was from this older guy from Guatemala, who was always saying, “Everything is always keep changing.” Truer words were never spoken. It’s only when we expect solidity—non-change—that we get taken by surprise. (And we always expect solidity, no matter how well we know better.)

Well, this is all sounding a little preachy, and let me confess that I’m not taking my own advice. At all. It’s all happening so fast. Paula has what we are hoping is just a bad cold, and I am doing a lot of inept caregiving. Our dogs can feel that something weird is going on. (“No walk? AGAIN?!”) But I guess what I’m trying to say is that the world is like a sleeping tiger and we tend to live our lives there on its back. (We’re much smaller than the tiger, obviously. We’re like Barbies and Kens on the back of a tiger.) And now and then that tiger wakes up. And that is terrifying. Sometimes it wakes up and someone we love dies. Or someone breaks our heart. Or there’s a pandemic. But this is far from the first time that tiger has come awake. He/she has been doing it since the beginning of time and will never stop doing it. And always there have been writers to observe it and (later) make some sort of sense of it, or at least bear witness to it. It’s good for the world for a writer to bear witness, and it’s good for the writer, too. Especially if she can bear witness with love and humor and, despite it all, some fondness for the world, just as it is manifesting, warts and all.

All of this is to say: there’s still work to be done, and now more than ever.

There’s a beautiful story about the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Her son was arrested during the Stalinist purges. One day, she was standing outside the prison with hundreds of other women in similar situations. It’s Russian-cold and they have to go there every day, wait for hours in this big open yard, then get the answer that, today and every day, there will be no news. But every day they keep coming back. A woman, recognizing her as the famous poet, says, “Poet, can you write this?” And Akhmatova thinks about it a second and goes: “Yes.”

I wish you all the best during this crazy period. Someday soon, things will be back to some sort of normal, and it will be easier to be happy again. I believe this and I hope it for each one of you. I look forward to seeing you all again and working with you. And even, in time, with sufficient P.P.E., giving you a handshake or hug.

Please feel free to e-mail anytime, for any reason.


George"

Lockdown, Part Two - Lord of the Flies

It's been two weeks since the government instituted an island-wide curfew. We're supposed to stay in the house, only venturing out for essentials.

The curfew started on a Friday evening at 6:00 p.m. Initially, the government announced the curfew would extend until 6:00 a.m. Monday morning. I remember naively thinking in those early days the curfew would only be over the weekend, but when the government didn't lift the curfew on Monday morning, rather choosing to extend it until Tuesday morning, I started to suspect we were facing a new reality.

I don't read the news often and, even then, not much more than headlines. I didn't have a full appreciation for what was going on in the outside world beyond our tiny island paradise. Or how bad it was.

The kids'school had already closed until April 20 and began online distance learning, so a new reality had already taken hold of the house. The curfew was to lift Tuesday morning from 6:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. to allow residents to run to the store and stock up on basic provisions, fruits, and vegetables.

A mad rush ensued.

Elise and I left the house at exactly six o'clock and drove to the grocery store. Many broke curfew. Lines kilometers long had already formed in front of grocery stores, wrapping around the building and trailing off into the distance for as far as the eye could see. Sri Lankans were practicing their own unpracticed social distancing, attempting to stay six feet apart from one another until the heat, the crowds, a lapse in attention caused someone to drift or stray within six feet of someone else in line. Elise and I were no better. The police were there, ostensibly to maintain order and enforce good social distancing, but they didn't seem to care any more than anyone else. And the news changed quickly, from one minute to the next. Officials announced residents had to he back in their homes by 12:00 p.m., moving up the deadline, then moved it back to 2:00, then -- seemingly under pressure of untold sources -- announced stores could stay open until the last person in line had been served.

We stopped at the first store we came to, pulled off to the side of the road, and donned our makeshift face masks, really nothing more than bandanas tied around our necks. We looked like bandits looking to rob a stagecoach.

A man sat next to a wheelbarrow on the side the road and looked us up and down. Yet, his look did not communicate anything out of the ordinary. When he was done looking, his gaze returned to the sidewalk or the dirt at his feet. I would see a lot of this over the next week, normal behavior in completely abnormal circumstances, as though there is a Jungian collective acquiescence.

We lasted in line about five minutes, quickly realizing -- when the line failed to move even an inch -- it would take us hours to get inside the store and, even then, there was no guarantee there would be anything left to buy once we made it inside. We couldn't afford to be gone that long. We'd left the kids home alone and had only just become comfortable with the idea. If we were to stay out all morning, it was highly probable Lord of the Flies-level chaos was likely to break out.

Dejected, we drove by a couple of shuttered bakeries in wildly optimistic hopes of picking up fresh-baked bread. To no avail. So, our tail between our legs, we slunked home, empty-handed.

Those first few days were up and down stressful. Elise immediately began placing online orders for delivery. Milk from one vendor, chicken and eggs from a second, greens from a third. Most of the orders would come. One even came at 9:00 at night while Elise and I were in bed, watching Schitt's Creek on Netflix. We leapt out of bed, threw on some shorts, and raced downstairs to receive it. Some didn't arrive at all as some vendors were shut down by the government or had their curfew passes revoked by the police. My office made arrangements for myself and several of my American work colleagues to pick up fresh fruits and vegetables from the recreational facility, a venture appropriately dubbed Veggiepalooza. Scavenging for basic essentials, milk, butter, beer and wine, has become a daily endeavor.

Fortunately, the government started sending caravans of trucks through the neighborhoods, selling fruits and vegetables out of the back. Elise and I keep a keen ear for the guy walking down the street before the truck comes through, yelling in Sinhala, "Cheap vegetables!"

I even bought tuna from a guy on a bicycle.

As the daily flights to and from the international airport in Colombo dried up for lack of demand, we were constantly forced to evaluate our decision to stay in Colombo and weather the storm in Sri Lanka. We are now down to one flight out, a daily jaunt to Doha on Qatar Airways. A lot of people did decide to leave, but for Elise and I it has until now seemed safer to stay.

It has taken all of us some time to settle into the new normal. I am teleworking, only driving into the office once or twice a week on empty roads, rolling past police barricades and manned checkpoints. There is something to he said, I guess, for an autocratic government where the person charged with quarantine is the general who ended the 25 year civil war and a populace used to living under martial law.

The kids have online school during the week, but there is still plenty of downtime. One of the biggest challenges has been trying to get the kids some exercise each day. Our decision to buy a bicycle trainer in Arlington before moving to Sri Lanka now seems incredibly prescient. As does our decision to pull the treadmill out of storage and have it shipped to us here.

We started a daily fitness challenge requiring the kids to spend some time on the treadmill. Elise had them running stairs in our three-story townhouse the other day. To mix it up, we put Peter's bike on the trainer. The rear wheel didn't reach the roller, but once we found a spin class for him on YouTube, he pedaled for a good 20 minutes.

After spending much of the last two weeks moping, Sam dove into an engineering project. He built a remote control airplane out of cardboard and the pilfered parts of a broken-down remote control car.

We are experiencing a lot of things. The first part of the week was rough. I hadn't run in several days. I had, at some point, resigned to letting my fitness fade during the lockdown. Elise and I were supposed to compete in our second triathlon in Sri Lanka March 22, but the race was postponed indefinitely. I told myself I would just get back into shape when the curfew was over. But I quickly realized I had no idea when the curfew was going to end. Most suspect it will last at least until Easter, April 12, or the Sinhala New Year, April 14. Some think the government could keep it in place until the Buddhist holiday, Vesak, May 7, in an effort to keep people from congregating. I decided when this was over -- whenever that may be -- I didn't want to be in a place where I was getting back into shape. I asked myself where did I want to he when this was over? Who did I want to be? When this was over, I wanted to be in shape. Since, I've been getting up early and running on the treadmill in the hallway in the dark.

One of the most interesting aspects of the global pandemic is seeing what mindful people are already saying and writing about this time of our lives, this moment in history. Nothing like this has ever happened in our lives. We talk about things we will do when this is over, when things go back to normal, but I fully expect nothing will be "normal" again. At least not the way we knew things to be. This is a paradigm shift, and we will talk about the way things were before coronavirus and the way things were after, in much the same way people talk about 9/11 or the Great Depression.

People, our loved ones maybe, are sick and dying. It's scary.

We’re collectively -- as a society -- feeling a number of different griefs. We feel the world has changed, and it has. We know this is temporary, but it doesn’t feel that way, and we realize things will be different. Just as going to the airport is forever different from how it was before 9/11, things will change and this is the point at which they changed. The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air.

The Kübler-Ross model, developed by Swiss-American psychologist and author Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and introduced in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, postulates there are five stages of grief experienced by people when they loose a loved one: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

I don't know what stage we are at now, but I do know the last stage is acceptance, and acceptance begins with saying, "We'll be okay. We'll get through this, too."

And believing it's true.