Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Sad Old Swinger
I am exhausted by the constant calculus of avoiding Covid. Too much, too close, too many, too long. Every excursion requires planning and scolding. And special supplies, hand sanitizer, wipes. I remember being casual about traveling, using gas station bathrooms, washing my hands and wiping them on my jeans. Like it didn’t really matter, just a formality.
No more. Everything is a production, a risk assessment. Pumping gas, getting a cheeseburger, peeing. No mistakes we say to each other, no mistakes like we are Seal Team Six hunting Bin Laden.
Getting older held the tantalizing possibility that between working all the time and moving into assisted living there would be a time of being deliriously carefree. I’ve planned on this since I was about seven, a time of consciousness when I realized that swinging on a swing standing up and pumping so hard that the chains buckled would probably not be a lifetime thrill. At some point someone would tell me or worse, I would tell myself, to stop going so high because I could get hurt.
I feel that way now about using the bathroom at the freeway rest stop. Jesus.
This will end, I know it will. I just hope that, when Covid is done with us, I’m not a completely enfeebled grandma draped in alcohol wipes with no nerve left for anything ever.
This is really taking the starch our of me, as my mom would say.
4 Comments on “Sad Old Swinger”
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
I hear you! The most exhausting is what to do with things coming into the house – things that could have a virus or two on them. I almost have a ritual for groceries but still get hung up over whether I recontaminated something between whipping it down/washing it and putting it away. Did I sit something on a contaminated counter? And then I wonder if I’m being compulsive or am I not being careful enough. And then I let out a big sigh. And then there is navigating social spaces where nitwits don’t wear masks.
yes, I so get this, jan. make it stop.
Oh dear! And yes, that ´’worse, I would tell myself’ really rang true, sadly, even at 61. Just the first inklings of ‘maybe I won’t ever do x again.’
Having been weeks ahead of you in Spain with the lockdown, all I can say, is that the mental ups and downs of lockdown fatigue and opening up are HARD. You are doing the right thing in doing the right things but, with the rest of everything going on in the world, no-one can say life is easy. (Revolution is not easy.)
Go easy on yourself today and find time to do something that you really LOVE to fill your empty spirit chamber, even if that’s just sitting with a peaceful view of nature and a good long drink.
After more than three years of Trump, COVID was a final straw. The camel is ready to collapse. I LOOK ten years older than I looked in 2016. We are all exhausted, worn down, frustrated, tired and a lot of us are also broke. I also hope that this ends before I’m so enfeebled I have no life left. You know, there is STILL no hand sanitizer anywhere in this area? I feel grateful we still have some toilet paper.