Covering one mask with another

Every now and then I get a Facebook friend request from someone who knows someone I know. I check out their profile, and if they seem interesting, I will accept their request. It's like putting your hand in a grab bag. Do you remember grab bags? We had them at school fairs when I was a kid. You pay for the privilege of jamming your hand into a bag of supposed goodies. You feel around among the wrapped objects and make your choice, hoping you chose the treasure and not the trash. I have yet to find treasure on Facebook, but the good news is, I can always unfriend the person after I see their true colors.

Today I accepted a friend request from a man (I presume he is a man, gosh, you can't tell from photos, can you?). A FB friend of a FB friend who is the brother of someone I went to high school with. That should be okay, right? I clicked accept and forgot about it. An hour later, a message popped up on my computer alerts.

"Hello, how are you doing?"

Oh, boy. Here we go. The last time I corresponded with a FB "friend," he tried to sell me insurance. Today, I'm bored and looking for some distraction. I have to take my entertainment where I can find it in the new age of COVID. I limber up my chit-chat fingers.

"Great, how are you? Why did you want to be FB friends with me?" I believe in the direct approach.

I wait and pretty soon the little dancing dots start burbling. And burbling. Either we have a slow connection or this person is a very slow typist.

While I'm waiting, I have some time to ponder the new world of grocery shopping in a pandemic. Yesterday I ventured out for my weekly foray to the store. As usual, I brought a cloth mask and a pair of purple gloves (meant to be disposable, but I'm recycling them with soap and water.) I carefully donned mask and gloves before grabbing my shopping bags (yes, they are plastic, and I bag my own groceries, so back off) and headed into the store, vigilantly maintaining distance and avoiding eye contact. I'm still a little anxious, but not as anxious as I was a few weeks ago. I'm starting to get the hang of it. Although I always forget to wipe down my plastic shopping bags, darn it. Well, whatever. Good news: I'm still alive, so whatever I'm doing (or not doing) must be working. It's hard to know, though, because my two-week-old actions might kill me tomorrow.

Eventually another message pops up on the FB messenger feed. My new FB friend has finally finished typing his missive.

"Well, you were among my suggested friends and I decided to add you up, sure you are not at me?"

I have to read the message a couple times to parse the bad grammar. Add me up, yeah, okay, I get that. Sure you are not at me? Hmm. Let me dodge around that hole in the sidewalk.

I write, "You are FB friends with [So-and-So], brother of [Other Guy], who I went to high school with many years ago. Are you a local person?" See what I'm doing there? First, I ignored his plaintive inquiry about me being mad at him. Don't really care about his codependency issues. Instead, I mention our shared connection (to build good will) and then I add the all-important words—many years ago—that signal I'm old and why are you wasting your time talking to me? Then I click send and sit back to wait, thinking about masks both actual and virtual.

As an older white woman, I'm used to being mostly invisible wherever I go. Wearing a face mask escalates my invisibility to a new transparency. People see my shopping cart, but I think they wonder, how is that shopping cart going by itself? I'm not sure, though, because I don't make eye contact.

Have you noticed: Avoiding eye contact is a thing now that so many people are wearing masks. On my morose days, it's always been my default mode to avoid eye contact. Making eye contact is excruciating sometimes. Now it's totally de rigeur to let my eyes skitter away, to glance at people sideways so I can take evasive action if they seem to be lingering near me or blocking my path. It's as if now that I can't see mouths and noses, I can't see eyes. And even better, they can't see me at all! I'm completely not there!

As I was cruising along the aisle hoping to score some facial tissue (allergy season continues to progress at roughly a box a week), I realized I felt more relaxed than usual. Invisibility means it doesn't matter what my face looks like. My expression was neutral under my mask. I wasn't walking around with an inane smile that I hoped said I'm harmless, please don't kill me. Nobody could see my mouth! It didn't matter if I smiled or not. Oh, the relief, I must tell you. I felt ten feet tall as I muscled my cart past the picnic supplies to the paper goods. Who cares if I can only buy one box. I'll sneak an extra box into Mom's order. That will make up for the loaf of gluten-free bread-like substance I bought her last week. No more slinking along the edges of the aisles, making room, grinning like a fool, giving way, hoping people won't be offended by my . . . oh, I don't know, you name it, my weirdness, my fatness, my whiteness, my obviously healthy diet of vegetables (just look in my cart).

Ding! My new FB friend responds, "Not really, we are just friends quite a while now. Where are you? Sure you're not mad at em?"

Seriously? Should I cut this guy loose or keep going? Anyone who can't write a grammatically correct message in FB messenger will never become a close friend of mine. Just saying. Politically incorrect, maybe, but grammatically incorrect, never. Still, I keep going.

I write, "Portland. What are you asking? I'm not understanding you, are you asking if I am mad at you?" I click send and sit back again.

A few nights ago, I went walking after I returned from my two-minute visit outside my mother's window at the nursing home. Spring is here, but warm weather isn't yet. It's good to get outside. I don't bother going into the park anymore, though—too many people. I wander up and down the hills in the neighborhood, crossing streets to avoid fellow wanderers. I guess I'm not totally invisible when I'm out on the streets. I admit, I feel just a twinge of rejection when the party coming toward me crosses to the other side of the street before I do. Like, darn, they rejected me before I could reject them.

Ding! There he is again: "About sending you a request. I'm from Austin Texas but presently in Copenhagen Denmark."

Wow! Copenhagen. That could be an interesting discussion topic. Later, it occurred to me to wonder what time it was in Denmark. Nine hours ahead, right? So about 2:00 a.m.? Insert heavy sigh here. Drunk? Sleepless? Up all night coughing with COVID?

"Why would I be mad?" I respond. "I didn't have to accept. I like [So-and-So] so I thought I might like you. Are you going to try to sell me something?" Might as well get it out in the open now. Insert long pause here. FB messages take a while to cross an ocean and several time zones.

His message appears: "No I'm not. I'm an independent rig engineer working with [Company Name] and also a teacher to the trainee down here." [Pause, new message] "What's your profession?"

Oh, darn. I should make up something really cool, like, underwater photographer or retired botanist. Penguin manager. Bluegrass fiddler. I'm not much of a fibber. Or a fiddler. I can't help but tell the truth, but not all the truth, of course, just the part of the truth that might make me seem really cool.

I write, "I'm an author and an artist." Then in the same message, I immediately deflect. If he is really interested in what I do, he'll pursue it. Meanwhile, I shove the focus back in his direction. I add, "What is Copenhagen like?"

After some moments, he writes, "Pretty, good entertainment, and beautiful morning when the sunrise."

"Is it cold there in the spring?" I know, dumb question. It's a conversational gambit to assess the willingness of the other party to be forthcoming. To bridge the gap. To extend the branch. You could do so much with that, really, if you think about it. Like, what is cold, in your opinion, and how cold is it, and do they have spring there, and what does one wear in the spring in Copenhagen?

"Yes it is."

Right. Okay. I guess I wouldn't be all that coherent at 2:00 a.m. either. Waxing poetic about spring in Copenhagen is clearly not something you can easily do in the middle of the night. Time to wrap this up.

I write, "Okay. I'm going back to work now. Thanks for the interesting chat. Stay warm, stay safe. Bye for now."

Might as well leave it on a pleasant note. I will probably unfriend him when I get home later. Then again, maybe not. In this strange new world, you can't have too many friends.

Looking for the new normal

Ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin' alive, stayin' alive. Sing it with me. Come on, Blobgots, I mean Blogbots, you know you want to, let me hear you bellow it out from your Zoom rooms. All you tiny squares, you. Dance too, if you feel like it, because I guarantee you, few of us are watching. It's too hard to see you against all your household detritus. You might consider noticing all the knick-knacks and gewgaws on the shelves behind you. Because we are. Oh, and please, some of you should dust off that ceiling fan, because that is all we can see of you when you Zoom on your smartphone.

I Zoom in front of a black curtain, because, well, you know, it's basically curtains for the human species from here on out. I don't know about you, but I am finding out a pandemic definitely complicates the chore of living. Everything seems more difficult. Maybe because everything is. I deserve a medal for just getting out of bed.

Being stuck at home means I'm excruciatingly aware of my physical presence in relation to the outside world. Did I bring the virus home with me today from the grocery store? Are my surfaces clean? Did something come in on my shoes, besides the usual bird poop and pollen? Did I scoop some of the virus into my lungs this week? Is this violent set of ten sneezes from breathing in birch tree pollen or COVID19? Did I transmit a tiny bit of virus to my mother's hearing aids, even though I wore a mask and gloves and sat outside the nursing home on a hard wooden bench when I swapped out the batteries last Sunday?

This stupid virus has made me ultra-conscious of my body. I'm experiencing corporeal disintegration  in real time. I can't point to any specific injury or illness. Rather, I'm riding a slow decline. The changes I see and feel are so gradual, I hardly notice them, until suddenly I realize it hurts to stand up, it hurts to bend over, it hurts to stretch, it hurts to breathe. Every damn thing hurts but not enough to take a pill and not enough to conclude it's the end. It's so odd to witness my activities become more and more constrained, like I'm standing outside myself watching the erosion of a shaky earthen dam. Do I try to patch the holes? What would that look like? People much older than I am push back against age. I doubt if I'm one of them. One marathon was enough for me.

Life as I knew it ended in January when my cat died. Already reeling from shock, it didn't really feel much more shocking when the virus came to town. First my cat, and then the pandemic. My response was, right, that makes sense. Total catastrophe is the only logical outcome. Finally, the chronic malcontent is vindicated. Since COVID19, it seems as if the world has joined me in my grief. My sadness is magnified a thousand fold everywhere I look. Even the stories of heroes, supposed to be uplifting, make me weep with despair. Nothing will ever be the same, not for me, not for any of us. I'm grieving a loss of innocence—I guess it is the illusion that the world was safe, that I was in control of my life, that I could predict what would happen next.

For some reason, I woke up the other night at exactly 3:45 a.m. and saw the final super moon of the year at its apogee, blazing brighter than a streetlight through the trees over the shoulder of the mountain. During the four-hour lull when the buses stop running, nights are dead silent up here on the hill. It's so loud I can hardly think. I am both alive and dead, like Schrodinger's cat, hunkered in a box originally of my own making but perpetuated by obligation, circumstance, and COVID19. I can't fully live until the maternal parental unit dies. But once she's gone, the box is open. I'm set free (assuming I outlast her), but the price is her death. And where would I go, how would I move, in a pandemic?

She's having a harder time getting up from her couch to visit me at the window. She shifts her fanny , then leans forward until she's got both hands flat on her coffee table. Slowly she gets her feet under her. I say, “Use your walker!” She pretends not to hear me. Bent at ninety degrees, she shuffles toward the window by hanging onto to her coffee table, then along the top of her flat-screen TV (pausing to read the sticky note I put there many months ago: Turn the TV on and off here, with an arrow pointing to the button), and finally, reaching the window. Clutching the window sill, she straightens up to look at me and smiles. She knows me. I'm never sure, until she smiles.

I remember when she used to walk me to the back door and we sang She'll be coming round the mountain together, me the thready alto, her the raspy tenor. The past two nights, she hasn't felt inclined to come to the window. I don't know if two data points make a pattern. Maybe we have a new normal. Every damn day is a new normal. After a while, normal ceases to have any meaning.