When I ask him what it was like to have covid, he offers a false-sounding laugh.
“ Plus he lost ten pounds!” Not that he needed to. “ Without being hospitalized,” I told my cousin Nancy. Every time the phone rang, I expected to hear that he had died. There had to be a gentler way to say this, but I’m not sure the news really registered, especially after his diagnosis, when he was at his weakest. You bought the plot next to theirs, so that’s where you’ll be going.” “Then I’ll call and say, ‘Dad, your mother died in 1976 and is buried beside your father at the Rural Cemetery in Cortland, New York. “If it happens several times in one day, someone on the staff will contact me,” Lisa told us over the phone. It’s a relatively new development-aside from the time he was discovered on the floor in his house, dehydrated and suffering from a bladder infection, he’s always been not just lucid but commanding. Rather, he’s what used to be called “soft in the head.” Gaga. He hasn’t got Alzheimer’s, nothing that severe. My father tested positive for the coronavirus shortly before Christmas, at around the time he started wheeling himself to the front desk at Springmoor and asking if anyone there had seen his mother. “But what if there’s a powerful surge this summer? This Christmas? A year from now? What if our next pandemic is worse than this one? What if it kills all the fish and cattle and poultry and affects our skin’s reaction to sunlight? What if it forces everyone to live underground and subsist on earthworms?” The moment I got my first vaccine shot, I started thinking of the coronavirus the way I think of scurvy-something from a long-ago time that can no longer hurt me, something that mainly pirates get. I still browse the dailies, skipping over the stories about Covid, as I am finished with all that as well. It’s so freeing, no longer listening to political podcasts-no longer being enraged. You don’t need to tell me about your job, I always think. When the new President speaks, I feel the way I do on a plane when the pilot announces that after reaching our cruising altitude he will head due north, or take a left at Lake Erie. It was exhausting, and the moment that Joe Biden was sworn into office I let it all go. To be less than vigilant was to fall behind, and was there anything worse than not knowing what Stephen Miller just said about Wisconsin? My friend Mike likened this constant monitoring to having a second job.
When Trump was President, I started every morning by reading the New York Times, followed by the Washington Post, and would track both papers’ Web sites regularly throughout the day. I am vaguely aware that Andrew Cuomo has fallen out of favor, and that people who aren’t me will be receiving government checks for some reason or other, but that’s about it.
Neither Amy nor I care about the news anymore, at least the political news.
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