Tag: coronavirus

Saturday on Sunday

It’s Sunday. But I’m back in bed, oddly repeating everything that happened on Saturday morning. This is the beginning of Groundhog’s Day, coronavirus version. Bill Murray, where are you?

So back to yesterday.

Waking up. It’s Saturday. Sleeping in to 8 AM is finally possible IF I can resist the urge to do something about the wails of our child calling for maman down the hall. That toddler crises is a hoax, one invented to test and try me. It’s the pire of all toddler whale songs. In the Bear Report, Olafur asks Sophie When did you learn to speak whale? after she plops her head underwater to call to the whales to lift them up to shore. Today she says. And that’s kind of like me. When did I learn to speak toddler? Who knows. Probably around the same time I started to get white hair along the front part of my hairline. But I know the whale songs of my child: when she’s hurt, there’s a long pause between her high-pitched shrieks. When she’s sick, it’s a lethargic SOS cry, low and run down. When she’s scared, it’s fast and pierces my heart – and I know I need to drop everything and run. But this morning’s wail was that of a cranky test. The worst toddler whale song of them all. It’s meant to be a coup, an innocent attempt to overtake my one extra hour of quiet morning time in bed all for the sake of better understanding her young, developmental exercises in cause and effect. Luckily Romain is patient. He’s been standing at her door, playing the role of mediator between a three year old and her mind on fire, on this, day five of full home confinement.

Though I have my permission slip, one thing I absolutely don’t want to do is leave the house to go anywhere other than the woods for a run. I constantly think about the grocery store clerks who are having to leave their families to go to work in a very public setting to aid in ensuring that basic needs are met. And I’m sure there’s more than a fair share of connards who have to have their cheese, thus risking infection to themselves, to the store clerks, to their families at home. If you’re thinking that you need to run to Lidl to fill your cart up with nothing but liters of Coca-Cola, please note: we will see you on the nightly news. I will throw my soapy sponge into the kitchen sink and gawk at your face on the television screen from across the room. There will be a few WHAT??s that escape our mouths followed by shame talk. And I will return to this blog and note your actions. Connards seeking cheese. And you with your soda addiction.

If you are reading this and live in a community that is on the verge of a total lock down, it’s time to get prepared if you haven’t already. Denial and mumbling on about your right to assemble is not going to feed you, nor will it help pass the time when there’s a child at your knees looking for a new activity to engage in every fifteen minutes. For my friends in the West, of the three main unalienable rights, LIFE is listed first. We all just want to live through this. So, in a rare exercise of my Aggie roots, hear this: it’s time to sit the fuck down bus driver. Get your house prepped, and then sit the fuck down. Really. It’s going to be awhile.

Livarot in the Time of Coronavirus

My office sits on the second floor of our home facing south into the garden. A few feet from my desk, a sliding glass door opens up to a balcony from which I can see the ocean when the sky is clear of clouds. Today I was in the middle of revising a set of technical documents when I saw Nina out of the corner of my eye. A small, smiling head growing out and upward from a polka dot-speckled mustard sweater seemingly suspended in air and peeking at me from the balcony’s exterior. I had to do a few takes before I realized she was sitting in her old hiking backpack (purchased off Craiglist when we lived in Vermont and put to so much good use) and strapped to Romain’s back as his head soon appeared, and the two could not stop laughing. Nina had a package in her hands from the mailbox, and Romain had strapped her into the hiking backpack in order to hoist the two of them up a 10-foot ladder to hand-deliver the envelope to me.

Thus begins the absurdity of day two of a 15-day confinement in France. Today’s digest of all things absurd includes the following:

— I hand-wrote my attestation de déplacement dérogatoire in pen in the hopes that I can simply use a pencil to make updates/erase/make updates again without having to recreate a new form each time I might need one. Today’s motif was for a déplacement bref, a proximite du domicile, liés a l’activite physique individuelle. This basically means I checked off a little box on my home-made permission slip to leave the house with the expressed purpose of going for exercise. The fine has gone up to 375 euros if you are caught without documentation. Though I doubt that I’m going to run into gendarmerie in the woods, I’ve had stranger things happen.

— The weather has been PHENOMENAL the past two days, yet we can’t leave the house to meet friends for a BBQ or have a picnic at the beach or take a walk along the port. You have to remember that it has literally rained every day since October here, so it’s almost a slap in the face that the sun starts to beam down on us when we can’t get very far.

— Romain’s week-old nub of livarot. Each time Romain has pulled his cheese box of livarot out after dinner this week, Nina’s ca sent mauvaise reaction has gotten more intense. Today the smell literally knocked her out of her chair, leaving one hand holding a spoon covered in chocolate pudding and another holding her chunk of bread that she dips into this pudding (this is my child) while she buried her head in my arm. The livarot looked like it had been in the package I received in the mail today and run over by the mail truck a few times before being put in a hamman to sweat out years of built-up impurities. Yes, a beat up, foul, sweaty piece of cheese. Put on our dinner table by choice. I watched Romain eat up every last bit as Nina fought every urge she had to shout out a disgusted BERK at her papa.

More confinement tales to come. I’m admittedly falling asleep every 5 seconds over here, so I’m going to go confine myself to bed.