I Decide to Drink
Saturday, January 16, 2021, Freeport, Maine
I thought I was going to write this week’s post about my attempts to understand Americans who defend Trumpism. I thought I was going to tell you about insights I gleaned from a new book I’m reading about Hanna Arendt and a debate I watched on YouTube between James Baldwin and William Buckley. But sitting down this dark rainy Saturday morning with coastal flood warnings flashing bright orange on my screen, I don’t have the energy for big ideas. Instead, I want to tell you about my ordinary day yesterday, Friday, about the ups and downs of it. Days, I am sure, all of you have.
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Friday, January 15, 2021
I decide it’s time to drink. It’s dinner time. My first drink in years. “Where’s the rum?” I ask Bob, “It’s time to celebrate!” I rummage in the back of a cupboard and find the bottle of Anejo, last used as flavoring in a French Apple Cake, pour it into a small green glass, add ice cubes and apple cider. Bob pours himself a small glass of red wine. We clink glasses. Smile. Hug each other. Say it is almost over. Looks like we’ve made it, looks like soon the grandchildren can’t kill us, we’ll play cards with their parents on Friday night, eat pizza together.
At 3:00 in the afternoon, after an hour desperately holding my iphone in my hand as if it were a lifeline that could be yanked from my fingers without warning, I reach the call center of Maine Medical Partners and, in less than three minutes, with only our ages as qualifier, schedule a vaccine appointment next Saturday at a center in Westbrook for both Bob and me. When I get off the phone, I weep.
Earlier in the morning, a text sprang up from the woman whose husband first warned me last February that Covid could overtake the hospitals, our lives. Call this number, she indicates, MMP is scheduling appointments for people over 70. I call immediately, but the recorded voice on the other end announces all the available vaccines have been distributed, try again on Monday. The New Yorker in me still carries her tenaciousness in her back pocket. At 2, I call again. This time a recorded voice says I am number 56 in line and my call will be answered in seventeen minutes. I can hardly believe it. Suddenly, I am in a line of only 56 people to get a vaccine that could save my life. The voice informs me I could leave my number and they would call me back without my losing place in line. I don’t dare take the chance. I hold onto the phone tighter. We have only one bar here in the woods, what if the connection is lost? I stare at the phone. My heart races.
At the precise moment when the recording announces that I am #1 in the queue, pandemonium breaks loose. The grandchildren, whom we hadn’t seen all week, arrive on the porch with a bag of fresh bagels from Maples, a gift from their mother. With my free hand, I make fierce Go Away gestures to them from the kitchen window. The dog, Luke, thrilled to have company, starts to bark uproariously, as if we are under assault. The home phone rings. Bob’s iphone rings. Somehow, by the time the real live woman’s voice says, in a beautiful tone that sounds like a song, hello, may I help you, Bob has quieted the melee down and I could hear and answer her questions.
Full of gratitude and amazement, I email friends over 70 the number (661 3300) and urge them to call and be persistent. I have one last telemed appointment, a man whom I last saw in the 1980’s, also my age, returning after all these years. We say what people our age who meet after a long time say. How did we get here, at the end, our friends ill and dying, our own end so near?
But liquor has its not so fine way with me. After dinner, after half the glass of rum and cider gone, I take a look at Luke, our twelve year old miniature poodle. Because of Covid, he hasn’t had a proper haircut in months. He’s now very sad looking, very shaggy. I decide, impulsively, to improve his looks. I get out the scissors, start to trim his legs. Suddenly, he bites me — hard on my thumb. I get several deep puncture wounds, which bleed. At that moment, Bob is searching for a lost box of chocolates and his perfunctory, oh dear, it must hurt, makes me angry. No rush for a band aid, no antibiotic cream rubbed on the three puncture wounds now spreading blood down my hand. In his defense, it is hard to distinguish my cries of hurt, for I might have made the same kind of howl had I caught my hand in a door or gotten a paper cut. And, when I alert him to how mad I am at him for the meager attention my thumb receives, he soon gives up on the search for chocolate and gets me a good band aid and the cream and makes all the right soothing noises.
We settle down, side by side and watch Lupin, a Netflix series we started the night before, and were transfixed by. At the end of the sixth episode, after only an hour of watching, the screen reads…Continue. That’s it. That’s as far as the creators of the show have gotten. No resolution to the plot. No redemption. No reckoning. We have to wait until the next episodes are written.
Disappointed, we turn off the TV. I scan my emails. First, there is the email from a friend I’d sent the notice to earlier about how to get a vaccine. She and her husband, she tells me, will wait. She has been told “they” are only giving vaccines to people who are seriously ill, and as she isn’t, she will bear the price of being well. I feel chastised, pushy, selfish, angry at her for making me feel that way. Making me feel that way. No one can make you feel anything is what the therapist is supposed to reply to that feeling. I am still angry. Liquor doesn’t make me a nicer person. I defend myself to myself. I could have lied my way into a vaccine this week, told them I was seeing or planning on seeing patients in person. But I didn’t. I have morals too. I send her a not very nice note.
Then there is the Washington Post news that the extra supply of second doses the government announced it was releasing this week turns out to be another lie, another mistruth, another disappointment we have to swallow, like spoiled milk. The man who warned that the virus could overtake us, also warned his wife and me that he isn’t confident that his vaccine appointment for Tuesday will actually happen. I will believe it when I see it. Now our 12:30 next Saturday doesn’t look so certain. Now I am back in the land of uncertainty, of distrust. And my dog, loyal for twelve years, has bitten me.
I go to sleep thinking that the abrupt ending of Lupin without further episodes which bring some resolution, mirrors our lives, my life. We are in a great holding period. We are holding our breaths for the violence that may happen this weekend, for the safety of the Inauguration. For Democracy. For the planet. Holding our breaths for how much vaccine there is, will be, how long it will be before we can pick up our lives without the threat of pandemic haunting every move. And there are so many more people holding their breaths for so many terrible crises crushing their lives: housing, unemployment, food. My uncertainties are so small in comparison.
I wake up with a headache. My drink is ¾ finished on the floor beside me. I am tired. I think of runners at the end of a long race. Some of them pick up their resolve, others fade. If the sun were shining today, if there weren’t coastal flood warnings, if the alcohol wasn’t still pulling me under, perhaps I’d be picking up my resolve.
My friend has sent me an email saying she didn’t mean to sound judgmental, explaining her belief that she has to follow her doctor’s orders to let other people with medical conditions go first. I call her, apologize for the assumptions I made about her. I tell her about the conversation I had last week with an esteemed epidemiologist who said it was important not to put too many conditions on who over 70 or 65 would be vaccinated, because it would slow down the delivery process and the most essential factor for recovery is the speed at which we can vaccinate, particularly the elderly. She decides to call the number too.
At just this moment of vacillation between energy and listlessness, between hope and despair, I get a text from our son, Colin. He is sending an article on breath, on how breath control is central to postural control and how the two combined are central to our wellbeing. The author invokes the image of the meditating Buddha. I straighten my spine, take a deep breath, recall the faces of the people in my circle of care whom I depend on and who depend on me. I remember the poem, written by this Polish author, born in 1945, the same year I was born, the year a bomb my father’s reconnaissance patrol guided to its target over Hiroshima, mutilated a city.
Praise the Mutilated World
TRANSLATED BY CLARE CAVANAGH
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees going nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
Thank you.