Tuesday, March 19, 2024
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COVID Comes Calling at Last

I take the 1 from 96th to 42nd and, with time to kill, look for a place to wet my whistle. 

A red banner on 40th: Printer’s Alley. How can I resist? My dad was a printer his whole life. I dabbled in the trade before I got my fancy degrees and my clean-hands job. I order a whisky at the bar and watch an NBA pregame show while I wait.

Soon, a lovely young woman with curly red hair enters and looks around. I get off my barstool. We hug. Such are the pleasures of being the parent of adult children. It’s my daughter Rosa, down from Boston.

Rosa helps me finish my drink and then we hoof it to a Greek joint I know on 10th and 58th, mixed grill for me, moussaka for her. After, we take the train up Broadway from Columbus Circle and call it a night. 

Next day we go back downtown, the express this time, to 14th Street, and walk west to the Whitney to see the Hoppers. Come out of that show and the whole city, brownstones and rooftops, sunlight and shadow, looks like a Hopper. We grab coffee and a light lunch at venerable Kobrick, near where my dad worked before the ‘hood got hip.

The bar, the taverna, the café — those are the only places I can think of where I might have been exposed. The rest of the time — the subway, the museums, the theater, the Zabar’s run — masked.

Saturday, I drop Rosa back at the bus station, tunnel out of the city and get back to State College by nightfall. Next day I get a call from our Upper West Side hosts: They’ve tested positive. I test: negative.

Monday afternoon, I don’t feel so good. I swab and swirl and drip again: still neg. Maybe I caught a cold.

I wake up Tuesday morning feeling, as Bub Dambacher, my old gold miner friend in California, so elegantly put it, like a turd that’s been hit with a board. I cancel my classes and go back to bed. That afternoon, I test a third time: positive.

I feel like a fugitive who’d been on the run for nearly three years before the fuzz finally ran me down. I’m surprised it took that long. 

Have I not been careful? On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 believing it’s a hoax and 10 hiding in a bunker with a lifetime supply of WPSU Coffee Break ice cream, I’m probably a 7.

Before the vaccine, I might have been a 9. I wore a mask in the Arboretum and in Spring Creek Canyon. I washed Cheerios boxes. I let the mail age for three days. I went nowhere.

After the vaccine, I chafed at continued caution. What was the point of getting jabbed and jabbed and jabbed and jabbed — and shivering through nasty reactions to the jabs — if we remained confined to quarters?

Bit by bit, of course, we ventured forth. On a road trip in spring 2021, I went unmasked to bars and restos in Nashville and New Orleans. That summer, I ran up and down the West Coast, mostly maskless. More of the same in the fall, though we all wore masks in our Penn State classrooms.

In late 2021 and on into 2022, though, with Omicron rising, I pulled back: ate my tickets to a Christmas show at the Blue Note and went back to Zooming with my classes for the first three weeks of the spring semester.

Throughout this year I’ve had several near-misses, a couple of here-goes-nothin’s and a few stupids: finding out friends I’d just spent time with had the virus, attending a big wedding, sharing a house with all the kids and grandkids. 

A few weeks ago, I went to a talk in a seminar room on campus. Place was packed. I yanked my mask out of my pocket. I looked around. I’d be the only one. I fidgeted with the mask. I kept it off. I was furious with myself afterward, certain I had been exposed at last.

Nothing happened. I did the same at a women’s volleyball game in Rec Hall a couple of weeks later. Moron.

Now the jig is up. No point trying to figure out who got it from whom or where or how. Main thing, mine’s a mild case: mostly a sore throat, which beats the heck out of a headache or stomachache. 

One side effect though: When I coughed, my lower back seized, which has been far more debilitating than the viral symptoms.

I’m still grumbling about the vaccine’s immunological shortcomings. Then I remind myself: In the early days of COVID, lots of geezers like me were hospitalized. Many of us died. 

Whereas I am merely kid-sick: not well enough to go to school, but not so miserable that I can’t enjoy watching TV in bed.