Many of our readers have written in to share their experiences: their struggles, challenges, hardships, and even unexpected surprises and joys. We will publish some of these submissions online and print what space allows. Essays, which should be under 750 words, may be edited for clarity and space. Please send your submissions to opinion@gazettenet.com, with the subject line “Readers’ voices.”
RESCUED PUP HELPS US ACCLIMATE TO SIT AND STAY
On March 7, we got a new dog. New to us, that is. Pepper, a small, friendly mix-up of breeds who was rescued from Puerto Rico, joined our household just a few days before we began to get serious news about how we should be responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. We had lost our beloved 10-year-old corgi in September to a fast-moving brain tumor. Since then I had been spending entirely too much time and energy on pet-finding websites searching for a small, mellow adult dog.
Pepper couldn’t have arrived at a better time. Like most other people, we are now mainly housebound.
My husband Bill’s college is closed, and with it the office he has lived in for decades. I have worked at home for many years, but am now getting used to sharing that space with another person.
The dog gives me a reason to be out in the fresh — or wet or windy or raw — air. She also provides the kind of built-in low-key social life that dog-walkers are familiar with. The social distance of that life is already in place: We do not get too close, using the length of leashes to let the dogs sniff and snuffle, if that works. We can get neighborhood news and check on each other’s states of mind and health, all the more important in these anxious days.
My husband and I are lucky as semi-retired octogenarians. Healthy — so far, so far — we do not have to depend on wages from a job that would probably by now have been eliminated. We do not have to work in an “essential” job that exposes us to extra risks. We can safely stay at home, with occasional forays to the supermarket and pharmacy.
Family and friends rally ’round with offers of food and help — help that, luckily, has not yet been needed. My generous local daughter-in-law arrived at the beginning of the crisis with two enormous loads of groceries. (So if anyone needs any canned tuna or Campbell soups, please get in touch with me.)
It is hard not to be obsessed by the ominous news that rolls out day by day, mostly, up until recently accompanied by recalcitrance and obtuseness on the part of our president. Finally, the government is beginning to turn the ship of state around. Congress is perhaps waking up. But it is maddeningly slow and late.
Still, to put our situation into perspective, I think often of members of my family who were caught in the fascist net during World War II. Conditions of deprivation and exile and eventually imprisonment and death came upon them gradually. By contrast, we do not have to hide from gun-wielding soldiers.
This is not as bad as that, I sometimes remind myself. The worst I have to think about is whether to try to devise yet another meal from the pot roast I cooked a few nights ago and whether I need to start cutting my own and my husband’s hair, the way I used to do when we were first married.
Meanwhile, little Pepper is providing us with pleasure and distraction. She has made herself completely at home in various nesting places in the house, along with a stuffed lamb toy she brought with her from her foster home.
Unlike our corgis, she does not rip this toy to pieces, but carries it gently and lovingly around, depositing it in different places or sleeping with it. Amazingly, too, she did not bark for the first week she was here, again unlike our often excessively loud corgis.
We don’t know anything about her previous life on the island where many dogs were abandoned after two hurricanes and an earthquake. She is, in any case, a survivor with a very good attitude, friendly to man and beast.
Still, she needs some training. I had hoped to take her for a series of classes to teach her basic doggy commands. But, after signing her up, these group classes seemed unwise for the moment. So I am getting help from online videos, teaching her to sit and stay, for starters.
And, I realized, that’s pretty much what we’re learning to do, too.
Marietta Pritchard is a former features editor at the Gazette and a free-lance writer/editor who lives in Amherst.
ANXIOUS, COPING: A FRAUGHT PAUSE IN OUR DYSFUNCTION
By NICK GRABBE
For the Gazette
I thought I was largely immune to the dislocation caused by the coronavirus.
I am one of the fortunate ones because the pandemic has not forced me to make major alterations to my daily life. But I have realized that I cannot isolate myself from the pain and worry that so many people are experiencing.
I am retired, so I don’t have to worry about going to work and picking up the virus, nor fret about lost income. I am a homebody, so sheltering in place is no big change. I haven’t been on an airplane since the 20th century.
No more restaurants, bars, concerts, sports events and meetings? No problem; I rarely go to them anyway. Social distancing? I am lucky that after 40 years of marriage I still enjoy spending time with my spouse, and can talk on the phone with friends and family.
We maintain a backyard garden and preserve vegetables by canning. We still have lots of applesauce, pickles and jam in jars, and lots of beans in our basement. We’re eating fresh kale and lettuce grown under our mini-greenhouses. We’ve planted peas.
On Saturday, I restocked the bird feeder, made seven quarts of pea soup, sawed dead branches for kindling, and did two crossword puzzles. My spouse hung laundry, darned an old sweater, transplanted baby maple trees and made grapefruit candy from her grandmother’s recipe.
And we tried to pay enough attention to the swirling tragedy of the pandemic to stay aware, but not enough to overwhelm us with distress.
But our penchant for self-reliance and simple living has not separated us from the effects of this crisis. We have been unable to see our son Ben, who is 37, mentally disabled and living in a group home that has had to ban visitors. He is unable to understand why we don’t come around anymore. Phone calls and Skype are poor substitutes for human contact.
And I have not gone to the Amherst Survival Center, where I have been the Monday receptionist for seven years. Deciding between caution and community was difficult, and it was depressing to have to choose caution because my age put me in an elevated risk category.
I usually sleep well, conking out for seven hours at night and even napping after lunch. But in the past week I’ve been kept awake, not by obsessing about the pandemic, but by a low-level, unconscious anxiety.
When all this is over, nothing will be the same as it was last month. While I don’t want to minimize the terrible reality of human suffering and lost livelihoods, I’m seeing some silver linings in this pestilent cloud.
The human race has now hit pause after many years of hurtling toward climate catastrophe. Maybe the coronavirus will force us to reexamine our profligate energy habits and conceive of a way we can live well without a high reliance on fossil fuels.
While we’re at it, how about we conceive of a way to guarantee health insurance to all and get our per-capita medical spending in line with other developed nations? The coronavirus makes no distinction between rich and poor, insured and uninsured, and it’s time we did the same with health care.
This crisis has made it clear that our president is unfit for the job and can’t even show basic human decency. Surely, more people now realize that we must have new national leadership this fall. In the words of humorist Andy Borowitz, “Who would have thought that electing a reality show host with multiple bankruptcies and a glaring personality disorder would end badly?”
Many of us are doing things we didn’t do before, and reevaluating assumptions about our lives. This forced interlude could enable us to get to the other side with new perceptions about what is important and what is trivial.
We’re also gaining a new appreciation of doctors, nurses and even supermarket workers. Fred Rogers said that when he was a boy and would see scary things on the news, “My mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”
We’re recognizing that we’re all in this together, and we need to look out for one another. This newfound sense of collective responsibility will help us recover from the crisis.
On Sunday, I baked six loaves of bread and watched a church service online. Life goes on.
Nick Grabbe of Amherst was an editor and writer at the Gazette and Amherst Bulletin for 32 years.
WHAT I’VE BEEN MISSING ALL ALONG
By TIM ANDERSON
For the Gazette
Laurie Loisel’s wonderful article of March 20, regarding the online fellowship of Unitarian Fellowship of Northampton [“I found a spiritual connection on my couch through a virtiual religious service,” Page B2], made me realize what I have been missing from my own religious practices.
Since moving here in 2011, I have been a regular attendee of St. Brigid’s Parish in Amherst. For me, and I doubt I am alone in this, Catholicism has always been very personal: We go to Mass not so much for the fellowship, but for the Eucharist.
That’s the centerpiece of any service, where we believe the bread and wine contain the real, physical presence of Jesus Christ. With all due respect to Father John Smegal, I couldn’t tell you what his sermon was at the last Mass I attended. I don’t recall the readings or the songs; I just knew I had to be there to receive Communion.
Sure, there were other parishioners present, but in reality, there might as well have been no one. For me at least, Mass is seemingly a stop-in for the sacrament. Amazing the bishop hasn’t announced curbside pick-up yet!
So it was no surprise that when the bishop announced the suspension of all services, I felt lost. I know Catholic Masses are available both on television and online, but those just didn’t have appeal. With no receiving of the Eucharist, what’s really the point?
It’s time like these I envy the denominations that place a premium on fellowship. Take music. While the Catholic Church may have had the early lead with all those wonderful chants, that was centuries ago. The choir at St. Brigid’s does a wonderful job, but despite their best efforts, we’re not much of a singing participatory congregation. It isn’t until Communion that I find myself “all in” for a Mass … and now that’s gone.
Mass may be a group setting, but one with an individual outcome. So if I can’t get that, what good is watching a virtual Mass going to do me?
And that’s when it hit me: Perhaps I’m doing Catholicism all wrong. How many of the faces I see at 10:30 Mass do I actually know? Sure, there’s the woman and her two daughters that sit a pew behind me. I’ve seen them for several years now. Yet I don’t know their names.
What about the middle-age couple who (I think) have two daughters that are away at college? Again I have no idea what their names are. Or the older woman who has a caregiver with her? The family of four, whose older son is an altar server? The point is, I consider myself an active member of St. Brigid’s Parish for nine years now, and I might as well have been going to Mass by myself for how much I’ve embraced fellowship.
I don’t know when life will go back to normal, or if “normal” will now be something different. What I do know is, when the doors to St. Brigid’s are re-opened, I hope to bring a new approach.
Perhaps we won’t be shaking hands anymore as a sign of peace. Maybe there will be permanent changes to our gestures of greeting. But whatever the formality, this has been a clarion call for me get out from my own bubble and pay more attention to everyone else.
Yes, religion is still a personal thing, filling an individual need. But it has to be more than that for me, going forward. For near a decade, I have taken my fellow congregants for granted. I’m just sorry it’s taken something as traumatic as this pandemic for me to realize it.
I don’t write this to focus on my Catholicism, or religion in general. All of thatis personal, no matter how much your faith involves fellowship. But as to my realization of how many people I’ve been taking for granted? That can apply anywhere.
Think of the people you work with; live nearby to, or even barely interact with. It’s times like these, when our social networks tighten (or even close) we may realize just how much fellowship we all share. When life comes back, it is my goal to appreciate all I encounter. I invite you to do the same.