Pandemic Reflections Friday Round-Up

It occurs to me that if I am washing used tin foil that we probably didn’t save enough for retirement. To say the market dives are worrying me would put it most delicately. Instinctively, as I have every time I’ve hit economic white water, I channel my mother, a woman who grew up in the Great Depression and really knew her way around a sack of potatoes. I bought the $1.00 pasta at Meijer’s today but stopped short of looking for powdered milk, a staple in our house growing up. I can still see it in the cupboard above the refrigerator, the big red and white box with one of those little metal spouts on the side. Sometimes, we mixed it with regular milk but not always. It’s a thin blue brew on its own, like milk Kool-aid. The trick to drinking it was to make sure it was insanely cold, but, just to warn you, that didn’t always work.

My dog, Swirl, ate half of one of my bras the other night, the new one without underwires. Such a cheeky thing to do, just chewing up half, so when I held it up by the end, it looked as if my mother (here she is again) had taken her pinking shears to it. What was it with pinking shears that made it so lovely to cut things? So tidy, I guess. Uniform. Orderly. Anyway, that’s how my bra looks. Pinked.

For the overly responsible among us, please practice President Trump’s extraordinary words from his press conference today because if it’s good enough for the leader of the free world, it’s good enough for you: “I don’t take responsibility at all.” After that, after he’d denied having any responsibility for dismantling the pandemic capacity at the White House or for stymying the deployment of tests so as to not hurt his re-election, after that, he shook hands with all the ‘experts’ in attendance and, what’s more, they let him.

All of Wisconsin’s schools are closed for a month. It’s a wise thing to do but it will bring great difficulty to parents who have to work and have no access to decent child care. And then there’s the issue of food. We have many, many children whose breakfast and lunch are provided at school. School closes, what happens? People will step up, I know. They always do. But it’s a lot harder right now to step up and keep oneself safe.

Speaking of safe, if you know of a shelter, street outreach, or community meal program in your town, show them some love. These are survival resources for people who are homeless. Overnight, these facilities are having to come up with prevention and containment strategies to address COVID-19 with the same staff and volunteers they had last month or last year – no fleets of medical personnel are showing up to relieve them. It takes amazing courage to open a shelter door to a family who may have been exposed to COVID-19. We need to support the folks who keep the doors open. If you’re in Milwaukee, United Way has started a special COVID-19 fund. Please donate. Elsewhere, contact your United Way and ask how you can help.