Love in the Time of Coronavirus and Jalapeños

A recent tweet making the rounds reads, "Here's how to get a message across" and shows a photo of an official-looking sign from Round Rock, Texas: "Texas Coronavirus Protection. Wash your hands like you just got done slicing jalapeños for a batch of nachos and you need to take your contacts out. (That's 20 seconds of scrubbing, y'all.)"  I laughed, as they say, out loud (how else?).  

I have been washing my hands a lot. There's no hand sanitizer to be found in stores and when I look online, the stuff costs more than printer ink, that formerly most expensive fluid on the planet. I looked up how to make your own because I remember reading an article in the New Yorker years ago about the invention of Purell, and I thought, gee, that seems pretty basic.  I've yet to get the craft project underway however and am just carrying on washing my hands very often while singing Happy Birthday twice, once to each cat, and using the gel dispensers at work and in banks and shops and wherever else I can find them, and nagging my family to do the same. Thanks to the still-chilly weather along with all the alcohol and soap, I now have dishpan hands, a dire fate for a woman according to the Palmolive advert of my childhood.

Another childhood memory came to me as I washed my hands this morning (happy birthday, dear Chica...) while twisting my wrists to avoid getting my sleeves wet: this was a maneuver I practiced only in winter in southern California. For a few months, December to February, my mother insisted we children wear long-sleeved tops (...but Mo-o-om) and soon after Thanksgiving, we would re-learn the extra step of pushing the sleeves up our arms before grabbing the soap. February to November is a long time for a child so each year, we struggled anew to remember, suffering a string of soggy cuffs until it became habit. I'm learning again, not because I can go 10 months without warm clothing, but because it seems I have gotten sloppier in my hand-washing. A digital swipe of lather did me fine. Now I have to keep those jalapeño hands front of mind. Advice to avoid travel is becoming more prominent. I have plans to head west this week. To go or not to go? What constitutes travel? My first stop is home--Los Angeles. Another stop to see my sister, and then my son. The only part of the trip I consider travel is Tucson to attend a literary festival and a writing workshop that I am honored to be invited to.  

After 9/11, when planes were downed and getting across the Atlantic near-impossible, I felt a species of panic knowing that even if something terrible happened at 'home' in California, I could not get there.  My (semi-humorous) tag-line is that I can be homesick wherever I am; there is always somewhere I am not and miss. Occasionally I indulge in imagining how I would feel if I still lived where my roots were, where I grew up. The fantasy falls apart because in that scenario I would be without my husband and my children and want to cry. I do though compare myself and my family to some of our friends here, born and bred here or near. "Are you from Toronto?" I sometimes ask a new acquaintance. "Oh no," they'll say. "I'm from Burlington." Mentally I re-phrase their answer: "Yes."

Journalist Jacqui Banaszynski writes in the most recent Nieman Storyboard: "Coronavirus is as big as it gets...We find ourselves in the oft-talked-about but rarely realized same boat. That's not just about the potential for illness, but about the economy, how we're being served — or not — by our public institutions, civil and lifestyle disruption, and even about who gets to own the truth of this story."

It's fucking scary. And it is even scarier for those of us--those many of us--whose lives and life histories and families are scattered across the globe, whose boats are always afloat. Do I go to LA to see my parents? Vancouver to see my son? Seattle to my sister's? Take my daughter with me? Does husband go to London in a few weeks for work and to see his parents?  

Be careful out there.

It's a new world, one in which the best we can do is aim to stay safe, stay strong, stay sensible, and not worry about stockpiling toilet paper (there are other solutions). 

Wash our hands and think of jalapeños.