Post-Peak Blossoms, Good News/Bad News, and the Hard Parts
Journal Day 12 (feels like forever): Life in my little corner of NYC in the age of the Coronavirus, Thursday, April 2, 2020
This is my new favorite street:
Here’s the same street, looking from the other direction:
I have been walking around the Gardens for many years, but usually more or less on the same route. Thanks to social distancing, I am now going to the Gardens via a back way and also avoiding streets where there are too many people, which has led me to discover streets, including my new favorite, that I had never seen before, even though the Gardens aren’t very big.
Peak bloom, alas, is starting to be over, and there are many flower petals on the ground.
On the way back, I planned to stop in at the Natural Grocery for apples, carrots, ginger, potatoes, cheese, bread, peanut butter, and walnuts. But when I got there, there was a line outside. The good news was that they were limiting how many people could get in at once, which was a great idea considering how narrow the store’s aisles are. The bad news was that the people on line, while not right on top of each other, were still closer together than I wanted to be:
So I thought I would take a chance on Target, even though that seemed like a long shot. When I was there last night around 8:30 for my pick-up order, there had been no line at the cash register and only one person using the check-out machines.
No such luck this evening at 6:30. The check-out line was much worse than what I had seen outside of the Natural. In fact, the line at Target looked like the line on any normal day in the before times. After a quick peek through the window, I kept on going.
I’m just going to have to improvise for a while with the food I have on hand, such as it is. But I’m going to need to go to a store at some point. Maybe I will try the Natural at a different time — a friend said she had good luck going around 2:00 — or try the new store, Angie’s, on Metropolitan, which wasn’t crowded the last time I was there, though maybe more people know about it now.
Another good news/bad news thing: I made some progress on my story last night, but I stayed up till morning to do it.
Today I watched Chris Cuomo’s show that I had taped, but not watched, the previous evening. This too was good news/bad news: He was offering himself as a living example that someone could catch the virus and still be functional and still pull through — but he scared me a lot when he talked about his hallucinations and, especially, when he said he had been shivering so hard the night before that he chipped a tooth.
I was listening to an audiobook by the Dalai Lama a couple of days ago. I wish I had the wisdom to be calmer in the face of suffering and death, but I don’t. For many years, I have enjoyed reading about Buddhism, although I am not a Buddhist — but I always got stuck at the hard parts — and it feels like we are living, now, in one big hard part.
