[This is the third part of a serialized memoir of life during the pandemic.]
Upon my arrival at the assisted living complex on January 10, 2020, friendly staffers checked me into my new apartment in room number 1326 on the third floor of Building One.
Its view was northerly toward my old home in San Francisco. Every few seconds from the nearby airport, mammoth passenger jets rumbled up and out to parts unknown, but probably to places I've been in the past.
Hundreds of times over the decades, I'd lifted off toward New York, Washington, Chicago, Miami, Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, Ottawa, London, Paris, Brussels, Madrid, Milan, Rome, Amsterdam, Moscow, Geneva, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, Djakarta, Sydney, Tehran, Kabul, Beirut, San José, Mexico City, Honolulu and many other cities.
Watching and hearing the jets gave my new place a comforting vibe as if I were just stopping in for a layover.
Little did I know it at the time, but that (a layover) was going to be pretty much the case.
Within weeks of my arrival, reports of a strange new coronavirus emerging in China were circulating in the news media. Not a whole lot was known yet, and in conversations with friends I dismissed it as probably "just another SARS."
Probably just a lot of fuss about something that wouldn't amount to much in the end.
In the back of my mind, however, I remembered the warnings from a handful of journalists like Laurie Garrett years earlier that a new plague was inevitable. It all seemed too unpleasant and fantastical to really worry about.
Still, the drumbeat of approaching danger kept up and gradually I started to get a little bit more concerned. My daughter Laila, the only other journalist among my immediate family, heightened my awareness of what might be coming.
She and her family were just back from Bourdeau, France, where her three kids had attended school for the previous six months. (All five members of the family are dual citizens.)
In Europe, apparently, the pandemic was being taken much more seriously, and Laila believed that she may have had herself it when she was terribly ill late in 2019. She had lost her senses of smell and taste at that time.
Now the family was back in Northern California, she wanted to keep a closer eye on me to make sure I was adequately protected in my new home.
At the apartment complex, meanwhile, I was receiving a steady stream of visitors, including family members, old friends, and former colleagues from my last workplace, KQED, which is the large public broadcasting company serving Northern California.
Since a large percentage of my friends are also journalists, the novel coronavirus kept coming up in our conversations during those visits. From what we could tell, the virus was especially dangerous for older people recovering from serious illnesses and/or with compromised immune systems, i.e., people like me.
What was going on with me physically and mentally at that time was a slow but steady recovery from four medical crises that had converged in 2019 -- pneumonia, hepatitis, tremors (Parkinsonism), and a stroke.
Although there was no formal physical therapy at the assisted living place, I was receiving weekly visits from health workers under my Medicare coverage to help me regain my strength.
I walked around the facility with a cane, or on bad days, with a walker, like many of the other residents. At first I didn't know anybody and I felt shy, but soon a few friendly faces were greeting me when I went down for the three meals served daily in the dining room on the first floor.
I would normally sit alone but one day I moved to a nearby table to watch two men, M and B, playing dominoes. They introduced themselves: B was a veteran in his 90s, and M had Parkinson's and was in his 60s.
Soon I would sit with them for breakfast and some dinners, when I noticed two other men, African in appearance, and speaking with accents. They turned out to be from Kenya originally, and soon I was joining them for some of the meals as well.
Also in our section of the dining area were four women who usually sat together at a table in the rear. They were widows in their 80s who had moved here after their husbands had died.
One morning when I got to the dining room earlier than usual they waved me over and invited me to sit with them. They were wonderful and talked much more openly than the men.
As I got to know these people, I relearned an old lesson: Most people are pretty shy around strangers at first so you have to be outgoing to break the ice. With some effort I can be charming and I like to tell stories about my adventures in the news business, Hollywood and beyond -- especially situations where I acted like a buffoon, which happened with alarming frequency.
All the residents were elderly, the great majority were white and well-dressed. Some lived on social security like I did, some had pensions. A fair number looked quite frail, and many wore expressions that indicated they felt sad or resigned to their fate.
Most everyone seemed at least a little bit lonely.
Some needed to be wheeled to the dining room in wheelchairs; their attendants hovered nearby, or in extreme cases, fed them with spoons and forks. Some folks were on restricted diets or barely ate at all.
I didn't realize it at first, but there were also dementia patients who were fed in a separate part of the complex, so with one notable exception we didn't see them in our areas.
My illnesses had drained me of much of my physical and mental stamina, and getting to and from the meals was the most exercise I could handle at first. Before and after trips to the dining room, I took naps.
Several times a day I took my blood pressure with a kit I'd purchased online and wrote the numbers down in a ledger.
The visiting nurse told me to do this, and she checked the levels each time she visited. I was on a drug for high blood pressure and another to control tremors, especially on my left side, which at times were so severe I couldn't feed myself very efficiently.
I had to get the timing with the pills just right to avoid having trouble at meals. Otherwise, my hand shook so much I couldn't lift my coffee cup or water glass to my lips to drink. If I tried it would spill all over. So on those occasions I left the vessels on the table instead and just sipped the fluids through straws -- or avoided them altogether.
In my room, I kept the TV on all day, usually turned to CNN or the sports channels. Except for the visiting nurses and social workers, nobody ever came to see me there.
When I entertained visitors, we sat in one of the common areas, which were hardly ever used by any of the other residents. Mostly, everyone just stayed in their rooms except at mealtime.
But a handful of guys -- including M and one of the Kenyan fellows, S -- were up and around some of the time, so I made an effort to track them down between meals.
S loved to play beanbags, also called Cornhole, outside in one of the courtyards at the center of the complex.
Although he was about four years older than me, S was in much better physical shape than I was. When I started joining him for the games, he dragged a chair to the area so I could sit in between turns, while he walked back and forth retrieving the beanbags for both of us.
It was embarrassing but I was too weak to do that for myself. To be honest, just standing up each time to take my turn would max out my energy level and when the game was over (he always won, which was good), I limped back to my apartment and into the bed.
But playing beanbags was far better than staying in my room alone and S had a lovely sense of humor and was just a thoroughly decent human being. He told me about growing up in Kenya, where it sounded like life was tough, resources were scarce, but people really took care of one another.
He said he thought people were happier there than in the U.S. but that he liked it here anyway. He cared for his younger brother, who was losing his mind but in a charming kind of way, and was the one dementia patient I got to know at that place. His brother was always cheerful, but when he spoke it was in non-sequiturs that none of the rest of us could understand. He seemed like a child, honestly, and S. just nodded and helped him with his food and to get up from the chair when it was time to return to his room.
They loved each other so openly I envied S. having. brother like that. But sometimes when we played beanbags, I would ask about his brother and S. would grimace. "He doesn't really know where we are or why we are here. He thinks we are back in Kenya in our childhood."
His voice trailed off. "Lately, he sleeps more and more of the time..."
The staff explained to me that under my contract I was authorized and encouraged to eat not only three but five meals a day and showed me where to go and what to do when the kitchen was closed. It turned out there was a special menu so I could get hamburgers and other sandwiches in the mid-mornings, mid-afternoons, and even after dinner at night until the kitchen staff went home at 9.
The reason they wanted me to eat so often was to fatten me up. My various diseases had robbed me of 75 pounds, or a third of my former body weight of 215; I'm about six feet tall, but in the hospitals I had shrunk to a gaunt 140 pounds.
There was a scale in my room, and I was to keep a record of my weight gain for the visiting nurse. Since my appetite was improving, my weight started climbing week by week...to 150, 152, and 154.
But even as I improved, the health professionals watching over me worried that the coronavirus creeping closer and closer to our lives was going to represent a major new threat to all of the elderly residents in the very near future.
They started to prepare for the worst.
Two months into my stay, what we now knew as Covid-19 had reached our front door and the facility rapidly went into lockdown...
***
(Today)
One of the things about the pandemic ending for most of us is everything that's been frozen for fifteen months in our lives is now starting to thaw.
To explain that in personal terms, for the first time since I stopped working in 2019, it is now dawning on me that I am actually retired.
I guess you could say I was in denial because sometime over the past year, I took the word "retired" out of my profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. In a moment of self-delusion, I even applied for a few jobs.
Nobody ever replied. Maybe they knew what I couldn't face at the time -- you can't go backwards. Just because Yossarian did it in "Catch 22" doesn't mean we mere mortals can get away with that one.
For me, accepting that I am retired is a huge development. It means that one phase of my life -- the phase that defined and dominated me for 55 years -- has officially passed on. It is fitting to write its obituary.
I *used to be* a journalist who reported lots of stories, traveled all over the world, got into a bit of trouble here and there, won dozens of awards, published several books, gave speeches, held press conferences, and so on and so forth. But that is over and finished now. I no longer do those things.
On the other hand, I *am* right now an active father and grandfather, and (I hope) an alert storyteller focusing not on the past but on the future.
Of course, in order to make the future count for much, we have to understand our pasts. And that's where the serialized essays I am writing up top come into play...
***
The news:
* Millions of immunocompromised Americans may not be fully protected by vaccines. They’re in limbo as the country reopens. (WP)
* Covid’s Next Challenge: The Growing Divide Between Rich and Poor Economies (WSJ)
* Biden Supports Israel-Gaza Cease-Fire, as Fighting Rages Into Second Week -- Mr. Biden’s language was carefully couched, reflecting continued reticence to criticize Israel despite rising international condemnation. (NYT)
* Under fire, Gazans are running out of electricity and fuel (WP)
* Democrats, Growing More Skeptical of Israel, Pressure Biden -- Among Democrats in Congress, attitudes toward Israel have grown more critical as the party base expresses concern about the human rights of Palestinians. (NYT)
* Japanese doctors call for Olympics cancellation amid covid-19 surge (WP)
* It's Time For America's Fixation On Herd Immunity To End, Scientists Say -- Researchers say the herd immunity threshold isn't the right finish line to end the pandemic. Instead, the public should just focus on getting as many people vaccinated as possible. (NPR)
* In the U.S., 60% of American adults have gotten at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. In addition, more than 4.1 million young people ages 12 to 17 have received their first dose. (CNN)
* India Braces for Powerful Cyclone Amid Coronavirus Wave -- Tens of thousands of people were evacuated from western India as a powerful cyclone approached. The severe weather threatened to divert resources from combating a deadly wave of coronavirus. (Reuters, AP)
* In Taliban-Controlled Areas, Girls Are Fleeing for One Thing: an Education -- Two districts in Afghanistan’s northwest offer a glimpse into life under the Taliban, who have completely cut off education for teenage girls. (NYT)
* DHS Failed To Analyze Intelligence Ahead Of Capitol Violence -- A forthcoming report says DHS officials had the intelligence they needed to predict that the pro-Trump rally would become violent. What was missing was DHS telling the people who needed to know. (NPR)
* For some Navy pilots, UFO sightings were an ordinary event: ‘Every day for at least a couple years’ (WP)
* Supreme Court jumps into U.S. culture wars with abortion, gun cases (Reuters)
* Biden moving to improve legal services for poor, minorities (AP)
* Bank of America to Raise U.S. Minimum Hourly Wage to $25 by 2025 (WSJ)
* Nations Must Drop Fossil Fuels, Fast, World Energy Body Warns -- A landmark report from the International Energy Agency says countries need to move faster and more aggressively to cut planet-warming pollution. (NYT)
* Biden to pitch his $174 billion electric vehicle plan in Michigan (Reuters)
* Biden says U.S. in race with China to build electric vehicles as he pitches infrastructure plans (WP)
* Nationwide Survey: 79% of people do not approve of companies profiting from their data. (Invisibility)
* Amazon is in talks to buy MGM, the studio behind the James Bond movies and other legendary films (Reuters)
* Phoenix Republicans Condemn G.O.P.-Ordered Vote Review and ‘Insane Lies’ -- Leaders in Maricopa County, Ariz., are hitting back at Donald J. Trump and fellow party members in the State Senate over a review of the county’s ballots. (NYT)
* Any amount of alcohol consumption harmful to the brain -- UK study of 25,000 people finds even moderate drinking is linked to lower grey matter density. (The Guardian)
* Tattoo businesses flourish again as Americans look for expressive outlets after a year of loss (WP)
* Warning Shot for California: A Los Angeles Wildfire in May -- The Palisades fire, which was 23 percent contained late Monday afternoon, forced the evacuation of 1,000 people and hinted at the severity of the state’s drought. (NYT)
* Increasingly Bold Israel Begins Building Settlements In Downtown Albuquerque (The Onion)
***
"Don't Stop"
Song by Fleetwood Mac
Written by Christine Mcvie
If you wake up and don't want to smile
If it takes just a little while
Open your eyes and look at the day
You'll see things in a different way
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop, it'll soon be here
It'll be better than before
Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone
Why not think about times to come?
And not about the things that you've done
If your life was bad to you
Just think what tomorrow will do
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop, it'll soon be here
It'll be better than before
Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone
All I want is to see you smile
If it takes just a little while
I know you don't believe that it's true
I never meant any harm to you
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop, it'll soon be here
It'll be better than before
Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop, it'll soon be here
It'll be better than before
Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone
-30-
