On a personal level, it has started.
A friend of a friend died in a New Jersey hospital last week after having tested positive for covid-19 on March 18. His name was Floyd Cardoz, 59 years old, a chef and cookbook author who had competed on and won Bravo's reality show Top Chef Masters. He was apparently working on a Netflix series with Aziz Ansari.
In The New York Times, Julia Moskin wrote that he "was the first chef born and raised in India to lead an influential New York City kitchen" and quoted one of his peers, Atlanta-based chef Asha Gomez, who credited him with elevating "Indian cuisine to the likes of French cuisine."
I had never heard of him, because the world of celebrity chefs is one of my cultural blind spots, but I'm sure some of you have; his death was reported on CNN and Fox News and NPR. I found out via my friend's Facebook post, which is the way I'll find out about most of the friends of friends I am about to lose.
She posted a photo of herself with the chef, for whom she had worked in her first restaurant job years ago. She said he was a "a pioneer, a mentor, a friend and one of the absolute kindest people."
Floyd Cardoz is the first person someone I know has lost to this virus, which still feels like a thought experiment.
Sometime in the past few days, I read a cheerful piece by a cloistered nun who said that one of the most important things to do when under self-imposed house arrest is to maintain some sort of structure. You need to get up in the morning, keep to a schedule, make your bed, shower, get dressed--continue your ablutionary rituals.
On her ESPN podcast, Katie Nolan offered another suggestion, which she credited to her mom: Don't lounge around in sweatpants all day, put on some jeans.
We get up at the same time we always have, we have rigged up a makeshift gym in the garage. But I need to shave and usually don't shower until early afternoon, after I've taken the dogs out for a walk and/or gone on a reconnoitering bike ride.
The river was up a couple of feet because, Karen tells me, they are slowly draining some reservoirs in Oklahoma; now it looks like it has receded a couple of inches. They are still working on various projects in and around Dickey-Stephens Park. I hope they will re-open to the public the sort of secret dog park on the northeast corner of the property, but since they are installing a lower fence between the dog park area and the ballpark proper, I fear they might not. We used--and policed--that little park four days a week; I hope they will not lock us out.
Along the riverfront, I have noticed the arrival of new homeless people and "travelers"--the digitally connected millenials and Gen Zers who have iPhones and Instagram accounts, who hop freight trains and consider themselves house-less rather homeless. I wonder how they are getting along in this pandemic. Not everyone has a place in which they can isolate themselves, not everyone has a bank account into which the government might inject a little something-something to defibrillate a stalled economy.
Going for walks and bike rides may not be everyone's idea of sheltering in place, but I don't see how I'm jeopardizing anyone's health, except, I guess, my own. I'm mindful of what I touch, I scrub my hands. I back up a few feet on the rare occasions when people engage me in conversation.
I think it must be strange for our terriers--they have always been so pettable, so used to the attention of strangers. But, though the CDC tells us, in its abrupt official voice, that "We do not have evidence that companion animals, including pets, can spread covid-19," out of an abundance of caution maybe we should, for now, avoid scratching the ears of each others' dogs. I will make it up to them when I get home, I promise.
They say Shakespeare wrote King Lear while in quarantine, and while that might be an overstatement, he probably did finish it off during the summer of 1606, after a recurrence of the bubonic plague forced the Globe and other theaters to close. (That interrupted what may have been the greatest theatrical year in history--in addition to King Lear, first performed on Dec. 26, it's likely that MacBeth, which wasn't publicly performed until 1611, was staged for the Court of King James in August. Ben Jonson's Volpone and Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy were also first performed that year.)
But he was Shakespeare after all, and plague was not an unusual occurrence in his lifetime. According to The Guardian, between 1603 and 1613, when Shakespeare was at or near the peak of his playwrighting powers, London theaters were shuttered more than 60 percent of the time.
And Shakespeare was involved in inventing human consciousness--that sense we all have of ourselves as individuals worthy of appreciation--and part of the reason that I cannot be content with work is because of the way he altered my expectations of the world by spoiling me for a richer kind of life than serfdom.
Shakespeare led us all to understand we were no less, and no more, than kings and princes. That we were cursed with psychologies and self-defeating impulses. I suspect it is partly his fault that I need to seek diversion; it was enough for him to retreat into the deep chambers of his brain and fetch out a Hamlet, a Falstaff, a Lady MacBeth trying to scrub away the stain.
I did not know Floyd Cardoz but I will always remember him.
What we hope will have no effect on what is to come. It will do no good to hope there will not be many more, or that the circle will not tighten, but we must hope it anyway, for we are human and wired to hope.
It is started. We are in it now, and most of us will see its end.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Read more at
www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 03/29/2020