Post 224 - October 21, 2020

Day 224…

The last time I was sick was back in early March when Michael and I got COVID. Since then, knock wood, not so much as a sniffle.

I am generally healthy - again knock wood - it takes a lot to knock me off my feet. Even so, on a normal year, I would probably have developed a semi-permanent rolling congestion about now that I would be blaming on allergies. I wouldn’t leave the house without a packet of tissues. At night I would be sleeping on whatever side was the clearest so that the other side could drain.

My doctor has always said that I don’t have any allergies and I’ve just never quite believed him. Every year at certain times, without fail, I get stuffy and I’ve always attributed it to some unknown tree that was blooming. My doctor would smile at me and say no, but I knew better.

According to my self-diagnosed schedule, I shouldn’t be breathing clearly right about now and yet I am.

Yesterday as I was heading home from my daily walk, I ran into a friend and an acquaintance who were finishing up dinner outside at a restaurant and I ended up joining them for a glass of wine. I hadn’t seen my friend in person since some time last year. We’ve talked since then, but not face to face.

Later in the evening, Michael and I decided to go out to dinner. While we were eating, we realized that another friend of ours was sitting across from us at a nearby table. She is another person that we have zoomed with once or twice since the pandemic began but we haven’t laid eyes on in the flesh. It was both amazing and just a bit strange to actually be in the same place together.

Not seeing the people in our lives has become our new normal. Running into these friends yesterday, really drove home how abnormal this way of living is.

I am guessing that contagious diseases, in general, are going to be way down this year - at least in places like New York where people aren’t behaving like idiots.

Yesterday, at one point in my walk, I found myself pretty far downtown, so I decided to take the subway part of the way home. The first A train that came along was crowded so I waited until an empty E train came and got on that for a few stops.

I can’t remember the last time that I was crammed into a subway car crowded with people. Before March, that could happen several times a day.

Before March, when I ran into my friends we would have hugged and kissed each other. I would have shaken hands with the people that I didn’t know as well.

When the waiter brought the bread to the table at the restaurant, it would have been in an open basket or on a plate rather than in a sealed bag. The waiter wouldn’t be wearing gloves and a mask when he brought us fresh cutlery.

On an ordinary day, before this past March, I would come into direct contact with hundreds of people in New York - whether they were friends or complete strangers on a subway platform - any of whom could have passed along to me some sort of bug.

It’s no wonder that I haven’t been sick in seven months. I’ve only come into actual direct contact with a total of about 10 people in all of this time.

I remember my sister telling me a story when she was pregnant with my nephew. A friend of hers asked her if she was going to get rid of her pets before she gave birth.

My sister was somewhat incredulous that her friend would even suggest such a thing. My sister and brother-in-law each had a dog when they got married and since then have always had at least one dog and a somewhat more fluid number of cats. The friend was concerned about the animals not being hygienic. My sister, on the other hand, was all about her kids being exposed to anything and everything early on so that they could build up their immune systems.

Living in New York City is a constant assault on one’s immune system. The upside is that we end up with incredibly strong systems that can ward off most everything that comes our way.

These days, as we live our lives in isolation from each other, I wonder what the effect is going to be on our immune systems. In the face of almost nothing coming at us, and all of this cleanliness, will our ability to ward off everything start to diminish?

In 1989 an epidemiologist named Dr. David Strachan proposed what he called the hygiene hypothesis. In a nutshell, what he was suggesting is that people who were exposed to fewer germs growing up had a higher probability of developing allergic diseases like asthma or actual allergies in later life. These diseases had risen precipitously, and he was looking for an explanation.

The factors he cited were the trending decline in family size. Fewer kids, fewer vectors of contagion. Another factor, according to him, was an increased use of more and more effective cleaning products.

A director I have worked with for decades always insists on there being hand sanitizer available on his table in rehearsal. This was long before COVID-19. We used to joke that he was helping to develop a super-bug.

Hand sanitizer kills just about everything you could possibly pick up. There were articles that came out that said that continued use of products like that would kill everything except for a few truly hardy forms of bacteria which would eventually gain in strength as they adapted to the hand sanitizer and kill us all.

One thing that we will all know how to do when all of this is over, is wash our hands. The cast of Grey’s Anatomy have nothing on us. Even in truck stops along the highway, there are now posted notices about how to wash your hands properly - a full 20 seconds, thoroughly soaping up each finger individually and under whatever rings we are wearing.

Hand sanitizer is everywhere. You would be hard-pressed to find a store in this city that doesn’t have sanitizer available to any customer that walks in. Delis have them at the checkout counter and expensive clothing stores set up discreet tables near their front door.  Restaurants sometimes have them on each table.

Prior to this spring, I never used hand sanitizer at all. Now I pretty much grab a squirt every time I see one. That’s probably not going to change. I start to feel like I need to do it if I’ve gone to long without.

The US Justice Department and the American Civil Liberties Union have just filed a report saying that the parents of 545 kids that this Administration forcibly separated from their parents at our border with Mexico cannot be found.

In 2018, this Administration instituted a “zero-tolerance” policy that separated immigrant children from their parents at the border. The Department of Homeland Security reported that between May 5 and June 9 of that year that 2,342 children were taken from their parents.

The outcry was such that the President was forced to sign an executive order stopping the practice on June 20th of 2018. Reportedly, MOST of those children were reunited with their parents.

This group of kids was from a prior 2017 pilot program.

Records were not kept of who their parents were. Their parents were deported back to their home countries with no information whatsoever given them as to the fate of their children.

Attempts to locate these parents on the ground have, of course, been hampered by COVID restrictions.

These kids initially went into a shelter system before they were placed with sponsors around the country. According to the ACLU, 360 of these kids can’t even be located. Their whereabouts are completely unknown.

Spokespeople for this Administration claimed that they were merely continuing a policy that was practiced by both President Obama and President Bush.

This is not true.

In the previous administrations, kids were removed when it was thought that they were being trafficked. When a connection could not be made between the adults and the kids, the kids were taken away. In the cases where the adults had actually committed a crime and were imprisoned, sometimes the kids were separated because they were not allowed to be in an adult detention facility.

This Administration, in contrast, instituted a blanket policy to take ALL kids from any adult who was seeking asylum at the border.

Where are all of these kids now?

I’ve been haunted by that question ever since I first heard about this despicable, sadistic policy two years ago.

These kids have been separated from their parents for three years now. For those kids who were babies at the time, they don’t know their parents at all.

I don’t want to imagine what’s become of them because my imagination takes me down roads that I do NOT want to travel on.

Being separated from physically interacting with our friends and family is proving to be harder and harder to endure as time passes for almost all of us.

I can’t imagine what this time would be like without Facetime and Zoom, however annoying both of those platforms are. In 1918, during the Spanish Flu pandemic, the majority of people did not have their own phones yet. They certainly couldn’t video conference. That I am grateful for what we do have is the understatement of the year.

Everyone I ran into yesterday was in the entertainment industry. Some have figured out a way to work and some haven’t. We are all trying to do the best that we can. Wow, do I miss sharing space with them.

We are three days from the start of early voting in New York City and less than two weeks away from the election. If we choose to, we can change all of this.

I could also use a deep breath of some good, somewhat fresh, city air.

Anything, really, to stop having to watch people endlessly trying to predict the electoral college numbers on TV. It’s becoming beyond painful to watch.

Let’s just vote already so we can begin to recover from all of this.

In the meantime, I need to go out and get some more hand sanitizer. We are running low.