Ambivalence in the Time of COVID

 

Grant Sisk

 

Ambivalence in the Time of COVID

 

At first it seemed like so much of the news one gets these days, Klaxon headlines and all the breathless, over the top rhetoric, visions of doom and gloom, on and on, the endless loop. I didn’t really think so, as people have been eating bats for as long as there have been bats. And people. Then again, maybe it was captured and encouraged to thrive in a controlled environment as is the case with so many of us these days.

After the virus escaped and went travelling and went jet-setting and went snowballing it was another thing entire. I locked my office door for the weeklong spring break and never went back.

In fairness, working from home wasn’t—initially—all that different; ninety percent of what I do I can do from anywhere on the planet if there is an internet connection, my laptop and coffee. Or whisky. One had to be careful during the ensuing days that stretched into weeks and then into months of videoconferencing on a multitude of platforms; no two groups seemed to use the same one and soon I became familiar with them all, as I also became familiar with colleague’s kids and animals, spouses, lovers, all drifting in and out of the camera’s eye, some intentionally, some repentant, others shocked and left to stand gaping like a latter day Adam, Eve or some conglomeration thereof into the blindness wrought by their world’s first sunrise. Mostly, we all just checked out what we could of each other’s houses and apartments like voyeurs, laughed at the awkwardness and little tech or proficiency deficiencies, such as one colleague who’d forgotten to “Mute” his microphone relieve himself during a break in the discussion. At least he flushed. After my first videoconference was over, I looked around, cast critical eyes at my home office, then began to move this and change that…staging for the next meeting. I also came to enjoy having the ability to turn my camera off and lie down on the sofa for a quick nap. I’ll miss that when the world reopens.

Later, it got worse. The meetings began to stretch in length but contract in frequency. Five one-hour meetings a week gave way to a three-hour video-thon on Tuesday and then nothing until Friday. We yelled at our kids, our spouses, cats were slapped from desks, dogs howled plaintively from behind locked doors. And there were other things. Sometimes we turned off the cameras and microphones entirely, left them that way for unhealthy periods of time, events unfolding unknown and unheard to the others who chatted glibly about projections, plans of action, the virus, accounts receivables, the return to normal, beginning to learn by degrees that everything was lurching towards an accounting. I began more and more to notice people’s affect, the ones who were engaged and chatty, and the others, whose cameras eventually went dark. Friends and colleagues in China with whom I had worked for years, whose homes I had visited and considered friends were guarded and to the point; we’d become strangers once again.

Outside of the house it was better and easier to handle. I’ve always been both restless and healthy and wasn’t overly concerned for myself, but I have elderly parents who rely on me for necessities such as yard work, groceries and company, but mostly company. That and traffic—or the dearth thereof—must have been a too great temptation to resist. I don’t know of course; I figured resistance was futile, so I didn’t try. That said, I really did try at first not to enter their home but it was no use and besides we share the same religio-fatalistic attitude, sort of a “God will do what God wants and anyway if it’s bad I deserve it” mentality so we dropped all pretense of quarantine in the strictest, really any, sense of the word. My dad was going stir crazy too and so we began to make daily trips to the farm where he grew up and where I run a few head of horses, using a lanky,  grey gelding we named “Maximus Silver Bullet Tall Boy” as our main excuse. From the very start we couldn’t remember the whimsical name we’d layered upon him on and started calling him “Huh?”  We’d picked him up on a short jaunt through the country to look at another gelding just as the pandemic was spiraling down into Texas. A casual glance out the truck window and there he was, fetlock deep in mud, penned up next to a double wide where he was being systematically starved to death by the owner. We eased the truck to a stop and just stared, wondering why anyone would do such a thing.  We paid the lady 130.00 dollars because she said that was what she had in him, loaded him in the stock trailer and that was that.  

Back at their house my dad and I would sit on the back porch as evening dissolved into night.  Smoking cheap cigars, we’d talk about how nicely Huh, a.k.a. “Maximus Silver Bullet Tall Boy” was putting his weight back on, owls, politics, the virus, the farm, his parents and grandparents and extended family, anything, everything and so on for hours and at leisure I never had before with work, its deadlines, my problems. We talked a lot about this new virus, this COVID-19 and how for some reason the world seemed so locked in terror and yet, it was like a legend you hear about but never really, truly encounter. Sitting there I thought about how life is always a mixed bag, the good enjoined with the bad and that if it hadn’t been for the virus, like so many people everywhere I’d have never gotten to spend this time with those I love,  my dad, mom, sister, my wife and her kids, my mother-in-law and my son, which is to say “family,” that group of people most of us say are all important in our lives; important we say it I guess, because we so rarely show it.  It occurred to me that with every loss something is always found.