And so the Gregorian and liturgical calendars align this year to give us Mardi Gras, Ash Wednesday, and Valentine’s day all at once. I didn’t really celebrate any of them. Birmingham doesn’t really do Mardi Gras and Valentine’s doesn’t have a lot to offer widowers so I spent the last couple of days with my usual work tasks and a legal case that I have to have opinions on by Friday. My relationship with Valentines Day is a bit complicated as it is the day that Steve and I used for our anniversary. As we closed in on one year together, neither of us could remember when we had first met and started dating but knew it was mid-February so we picked the 14th as it would be easy to remember and kill two birds with one stone. As marriage wasn’t possible during our years together, we never had another legal alternative. Tommy and I, on the other hand, had two dates. October 27th, the day we met (and we both agreed that was the correct date after consulting a calendar about a year later) and July 11th, the date we were legally married in Washington in 2014. We celebrated the October date. Well, celebrated isn’t really the right word. Tommy hated culturally approved Hallmark holidays of any stripe but he loved presents when given at random intervals or to celebrate things out of the mainstream.
If Steve had lived, today would be our 35th anniversary. Would we have made it the distance? Who can say? We went through some rough patches but the rhythms we eventually developed here in Birmingham with him devoting himself to his art and to cultural pursuits made him happier and more peaceful than he had been at any other time of his life so I like to believe that just maybe we would have. He would be 75 now. Something I don’t care to contemplate. I don’t think he would have taken to elderhood with any sort of grace and I would be footing bills for Botox and hair dye and liposuction were he still with me. Of course, if he were still here, I would never have had Tommy or either of my other careers as performer and author. And someone else would be playing my role in Into the Woods this weekend. I might have gotten involved with theater again while with him (I was making a few moves in that direction in California before we were unceremoniously shown the door by the University of California) but it probably would have been a very different arc.
And so I have a very difficult relationship with Valentine’s Day. It brings up too many memories. They’re a jumble of good and bad. The problem is that they bring emotions with them and then I have my usual issues with my interior emotional life – not being very good at categorizing what those feelings are and, because i can’t fully understand or control them, my intellectual side tends to label them as ‘bad’ in some way and try to shut me off from them. I am well aware that this can infuriate people who are close to me as it makes me more remote and shut down as the emotional stakes get higher but there it is. It’s just part of the package. I don’t have a bad relationship with Mardi Gras. I tend to ignore it. Our first spring here in the South, Steve and I went to NOLA for a Mardi Gras weekend. We usually loved New Orleans but we hated that experience with tens of thousands of drunk college students and I’ve never been back during the season since. Tommy lived in the New Orleans area for a couple of years in his 20s working as a cook for Ralph and Kacoo’s seafood restaurant. He was in the French Quarter one Mardi Gras weekend night when someone pulled a knife and the crowd panicked. He fell and was trampled. His hips were never quite the same afterwards and he never wanted to return. And that incident was a knife. These days it would probably be an AK-47.
I did a presentation to a local social club yesterday on aging with a couple of readings from the books. It was an audience of aging gentility in a very exclusive gated community. I wouldn’t be caught dead living there but chacun a sont gout. The first volume is not yet three years old but it already is starting to feel like a historical document from another time when I read from it. I guess that’s part of the point. What I hope happens with The Accidental Plague Diaries is that they become a decent primary source for someone who is researching the madness of the early 2020s decades from now. As we continue to emerge from pandemic thinking to endemic thinking, events of even a year ago are starting to feel like a bit of a fever dream and it’s so very hard to keep memories and relative time of the last four years or so straight in my head. And it’s spilling over from public health thinking into all other areas of our lives. I think it’s one of the reasons why we are finding it so easy to reframe and rewrite the recent history of our politics and governance and why there’s so little pushback on the bald faced lies that seem to emerge from both state and national capitols on a routine basis.
The CDC is considering dropping its quarantine/masking recommendations for those diagnosed with Covid. It’s not that they don’t think it’s a good idea. They’re just acceding to the current reality of endemic spread – it’s everywhere and quarantining the few that test and play by the rules is really making no difference in terms of either spread or strain on the health care system. They haven’t made the change yet but it’s likely to happen shortly. The practical results of this will be Covid infected needing to go to work as they won’t be granted PTO by their employers and, if they have jobs interfacing with the public, a greater chance of spread from workplace to population and certainly a high incidence of infecting coworkers. My last Covid, caught in August of 2022, was a workplace exposure. Half my VA unit was out. It was a few days after our Joint Commission inspection so we’re pretty sure they brought it in to us. I’ll be interested to see what health care institutions do regarding staff infections should the CDC make this change given how thin our service lines are stretched and how efficient health care settings can be in spreading infectious disease.
I’m personally not terribly worried about Covid these days. I’ve had every booster as its become available. I wasn’t that sick with my last case and I tend to bounce back quickly from whatever ails me. I still have some trepidation regarding long Covid as that seems to continue to dog a certain segment of the population. No one knows how many as there’s no agreement on what it is and what it isn’t and, without a decent definition, how can you survey and count? The most recent numbers I could find suggest there are about 17 million Americans with long Covid and somewhere between 3 and 4 million of them are disabled enough to be unable to work. That’s 1% of the population out of the workforce due to a single disease that’s only been around for four years. Those numbers are huge. Roughly 13% of Americans have a disability of some kind and roughly 7% are so disabled they cannot function independently (mainly elderly). Long Covid makes this jump from about 7 to 8% or so, a 13% increase in need for supportive services at a time when the population is aging and people are leaving the health care workforce in droves. And people wonder why they can’t get a next day doctor’s appointment.
It’s going to get really ugly out there over the next five years or so. This is why I’m contemplating retirement and why I’m working on a new book…
Life, The Universe, and Everything 