Covid and Me

When I saw the result on the email from Walgreen's—"positive"—I was momentarily taken aback. Evidently I had Covid! After two long years on the sidelines, the coach was finally sending me out onto the field.

(Yes, but who really wants to play? And who is the coach?)

I was slightly flabbergasted. I couldn't quite wrap my head around the idea. Who, me? But it wasn't merely an idea. The determination came from a lab test, hence highly reliable. I'd had a sore throat for several days, and I'd stood in a room packed with thirty or forty people talking wildly for several hours the previous Sunday. That's why I took the test.

Yet I didn't feel nearly as dreadful as you imagine someone feels when you're told that he or she has Covid, and, utterly surprised, you groan "Oh, no!" in sincere sympathy. Not that bad at all.

Some get it worse than others, I realize. And some have no symptoms at all. As for myself,  I felt like you feel when you've got a cold: a cough, a sneeze, a runny nose. A fiery sore throat at night, but not bad at all during the daytime.

In fact, the previous day, following an at-home test that came out negative, I'd gone to a library sale in St. Anthony Park to check out the CDs. I brought a mask, of course, but forgot my reading glasses, and few things are harder to decipher than the lettering on the spines of a long row of jewel cases lined up in a cardboard box in the shadowy hall of a library basement. There were four or five such boxes, but no jazz in sight.

I struggled to come up with four items, fifty cents apiece, all from the fringes of the classical world: an anthology of Manuel de Falla's orchestral works including "Love, the Magician," which serves as the soundtrack of Carlos Saura's great flamenco film of the same name; a two-CD set of Scriabin's astral piano music; some sluggish organ works by Edgar Elgar that I almost threw out the window of the car after a brief listen on the way home; and a collection of Darius Milhaud's piano works that I used to love and still have on LP in the basement, though my turntable is kaput I have no way to listen to it.

Perhaps I wouldn't have done the drive-through Walgreen's test, which takes two days to process, except that we'd been invited to a dinner at the house of some friends who were leaving a few days later with their granddaughter on a vacation to Africa. Wouldn't want to muck up their plans by transmitting a dreaded disease! No doubt, the fact that three other friends at the party we'd attended the previous Sunday now had Covid also figured into the equation.

But I don't for an instant regret going to that party to honor the memory of our old friend Mary, who died recently after a long struggle with a rare form of Parkinson's. I can't recall being in a room with a larger and more closely packed collection of animated, good-natured, and chatty people, many of whom I knew only slightly, or only by reputation. 

Mary's husband, Dana, has told many tales over the years about his California friends Barbara, Tom, Frank, and others I might have forgotten. Here they were, in the flesh. We'd heard stories about Mary's sisters and cousins, a few of whom had flown in from Baltimore or Arizona. And we'd known Mary and Dana's two sons and their wives and fabulous children for decades, though we rarely saw any of them. Mary's son Wyatt gave a heartfelt and eloquent introductory speech that lovingly captured Mary's free-wheeling yet deeply caring and appreciative personality, and the entire event, as Dana told me later, "Couldn't have gone much better."

Our friends Jane and Louis brought their daughter Emily along, and it was nice to chat with them all. Louis had recently gotten back from a ten-day "vacation" as part of a crew clearing brush along the North Country Trail in northern Minnesota. A few days after the party, as promised, I emailed him a photo I took a few weeks ago of the same trail several hundred miles to the east as it crosses the Presque Isle River in Upper Michigan. The raging water is at least five feet deep.

In return, Louis informed me that both he and Jane had tested positive for Covid, and sent me a photo of the anti-viral drug they were taking. I ordered some, too, and Hilary picked it up for me this afternoon. She never caught the virus, strange to say. She got a negative result back from Walgreen's just this afternoon, and we've started to wear masks around the house.

This morning our friend Tim, soon off to Africa, dropped off a "doggy bag" of grilled meat and vegetables from the dinner we missed, along with two half-empty bottles of wine from the same event. We'll have it all for dinner tonight.  

I'm still in quarantine until tomorrow. But it's just my good luck that the finals of the Rollad Garros  tennis tournament is on tomorrow morning. Maybe I'll make an egg pie or sneak off to the store for some croissants in early morning light, when no one's around, and throw that CD of Milhaud's piano music onto the stereo to play during commercials.

Will Nadal win his fourteenth French Open title, on that sore foot of his? Maybe. Maybe not. But it would be a little foolhardy to bet against him, considering the tight spots he's already extricated himself from on the way to the finals.