Post 436 - January 11, 2022

Day 679…

The holidays came months before I was ready for them and now, they’ve passed just as quickly. It is very cold today in the city, but I can see that it is at least ten degrees colder upstate.

There’s a rather lovely Christmas custom in Italy that centers around a character called La Befana. In Italy, presents come from her rather than from Santa Claus. There are several versions of her story, some darker than others, but the one that I like says that she was an old woman who ran an inn. The three Wise Men who were on their way to find the newly born savior stop to ask her if she knows the way. She doesn’t but she feeds the men and gives them beds for the night. The next morning, grateful to her for taking care of them, the three Wise Men ask her if she’d like to come with them explaining that they are following the star in the sky. She says no and sends them on their way.

Some stories say that she had lost a child herself and the thought of seeing another baby was too much for her. Later, though, she changes her mind and sets out to follow them but it’s too late. She never finds them or the baby Jesus. The legend says that she has been looking for him ever since. She brings toys and sweets to every child she passes, just in case.

La Befana translates to “the witch” and, indeed, she is usually portrayed as being an ugly old Halloween crone covered in soot and riding a broom, but she is beloved by Italian children regardless. They hang up their socks in anticipation of her coming down their chimneys on the night before Epiphany on January 5th. If they’ve been good, they find a piece of candy or a toy tucked inside and if they’ve been bad, a lump of coal or a stick.

In some towns, La Befana makes an appearance by sliding down a zipline with a bag of treats from the tallest tower in the main piazza. Michael and I went to Assisi the other night to see her but because of COVID, the event of her arrival was cancelled. Instead, like Santa in a department store, she was seated inside a hall, wearing a mask, and children lined up in front of her to get a piece of wrapped candy.

In another nearby town, called Bevagna, they presented a living Nativity. I don’t know how they usually do it, but this year small groups of about 40 or so people at a time went into the Church of St. Michael’s in the main piazza to watch the arrival of the Three Kings. By the time we got in, the cast had clearly performed it many times already. They were starting to suffer from long-run-itis. At the top, the holy family was covered with a huge white sheet. As the angel started speaking, the sheet was slowly pulled upstage to reveal them. Very slowly. It got caught several times and had to be helped off by Mary and Joseph from underneath it. Once revealed, Joseph, who looked about eighteen or nineteen, could not keep it together. He and a shepherd started to laugh every time they looked at each other. Mary, on the other hand, did not break. She kept her eyes resolutely on the infant Jesus and muscled her way through it.  One of the Kings seemed as if he’d acted before, and someone in charge seems to have realized that because he was given the bulk of the lines.

After the reenactment, which was everything we wanted it to be, we were led by a guy playing the bagpipes to several different locations in the town that had been turned into medieval craft centers. There was a candle-maker, a painter, a papermaker, and weavers. Michael and I were concerned about traveling with the group given that we had to test negative to fly a few days hence, so we peeled off and went into the setups on our own. Afterward, we had a wonderful dinner of the local specialty, fried pork neck, and then headed home.

Yesterday, back in New York, I walked downtown in the frigid cold to see what had changed in the time we had been gone. As in Italy, most everyone I passed was wearing a mask. As in Italy, you cannot walk two steps without being reminded that we are in the middle of a pandemic, but the indicators are so present and, by this point, so expected, that I’m not sure if I wasn’t looking for them whether I would have noticed at all.

Every store has some sort of sign in the window about wearing a mask. In Italy most every shop also had a sign out front indicating the number of people allowed in at any one time. Our local farmacia where we got our tests 24 hours before we flew allowed two people at a time in. We had made an appointment a week or two before but even so, ended up waiting outside on the cobblestoned street for about an hour. They did the testing in a room next door with its own door to the street. The pharmacist was covered in PPE from head to foot and brought us in one at a time, but kept us just inside the door, which was kept open the whole time for the air to circulate.

The case rate in Umbria, just as here, is skyrocketing. Hospitals are filling up with the mostly unvaccinated victims of it. Just like here, people are trying to push forward with their lives regardless. Nobody wants to go back to locking things down.

One of the first things we did when we got to Italy was to get the EU version of our Excelsior Pass, the Green Pass. Our green pass’s QR codes were checked every time we went into a restaurant or a museum or on a ferry or on the train. Flying home, we went through five separate levels of security checks in the Rome airport before we were allowed to board the plane. The pass and our negative tests were checked each time. Our temperatures were checked twice. We connected through Heathrow in London and then continued to the US, where nothing at all was checked. We had been told to fill out US governmental forms to be presented, which we had, but nobody ever asked for them. Unlike the European forms, these weren’t electronic. We’d had to print them out on paper and fill them out with pens.

If everyone who could be vaccinated, had been, it is likely that the virus would have faced more difficulty spreading than it did. Likely, but not certain since the Omicron variant seems to hit the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike. It turns out that my friend Enrico who passed away a few days ago after spending a month on a ventilator hadn’t been vaccinated at all and was firmly against it.

The fear and anxiety around what we are all facing, and I do mean ALL, is manifesting itself in a myriad of different ways. Enrico took in the information he was exposed to, processed it, and decided not to get vaccinated. I took in the information and decided that I was more comfortable being vaccinated than not. There are plenty of unvaccinated people out there who are just fine. We are all making choices the best we can, and the truth of the matter is, none of them are necessarily the right choice. Enrico and I are just two people. That he decided not to get vaccinated and is now dead and I decided to get vaccinated and am still alive may be more a result of statistics than wise decision-making. The end results could very easily have ended up the other way round with us having made the same choices.

I still believe that had Enrico been vaccinated that there is a very good chance that he’d still be alive. The statistical data supports me on that. It isn’t a certainty, however, that that would be the case.

Against all CDC recommendations, Michael and I chose to go to Italy this past month. We really thought about it. We tried to take the “because we want to,” out of it and look at it as clearly as we could. We have figured out how to navigate through New York City and we looked at where we were going and felt that we’d be able to do the same thing there, too. We would be more isolated from other people there than we would have been here. In a day or two we will take another test to be sure, but, at least in terms of COVID, we seem to have weathered the risk. To be honest, I don’t know how much of a risk we took. I don’t know, statistically, how many people who made the same decisions that we did and went to Europe for the holidays got sick. I don’t know if our reasoning was sound or whether we just dodged a bullet out of sheer dumb luck.

The overwhelming majority of us making decisions are not doctors. Should schools open or close? Should Broadway have reopened or was it folly to try so soon? Should we lockdown again or press ahead? Not even all the doctors fully agree on any of what we should do.

I am more fearful of missing out on life than I am about losing my life. Not by much, mind you, but put both of those options on the scale and mine tilts a bit towards the former. Life has a way of throwing obstacles at you just as it starts to seem as if you’ve got a clear road ahead. I have come to see that it is the obstacles where life is truly lived, not on the clear road.

I can look critically at the decisions that the people in charge of everything from the government to Broadway are making but were I in their positions, would I make any that are different? The government decided that they needed Broadway to reopen, so they awarded the producers grants to make it happen. They needed an infusion to shore up the economy right away, so they put an expiration date on those grants so that shows had to open sooner than anyone was comfortable doing. From the safety of my sofa, I can look at that and think that, for the health of all, the producers should just have said no, but now I’m not so sure.

We all dove into the deep end of this crisis. Some are sinking and some are swimming. I think that we are learning more about ourselves over this time than we ever imagined.

I am not as angry at Enrico for not getting vaccinated as I was when I first heard. I still think he should have done it, but it was his choice. He jumped in right along with the rest of us.

All any of us can do is to try and keep swimming.