If you insist on criticizing, then at least surround it with praise.
First praise, then criticize, then praise again.

Mao Tse Tung is usually given the credit for that exceedingly wise advice. It doesn’t sound much like him, but maybe. At any rate, I usually follow it. And will this time, too.

So, first, some much deserved praise: For everyone who, at no small risk to themselves, has made these two months of lockdown a little more bearable and a tad less fearsome. The nurses, doctors, EMTs and hospital workers; the sanitation workers and police and firefighters; the Amazon and FedEx and USPS delivery persons; the doormen and porters and janitors; the grocery store clerks, the truck drivers, the soldiers and sailors and members of the National Guard. And, most of all, our neighbors. The folks who left an extra roll of toilet paper, a casserole, or a bottle of Prosecco outside the door. A kudo, a pat on the back, to each of us who has helped keep everyone else healthy by staying indoors, maintaining that critical six-foot distance, faithfully donning a mask, and forsaking visits, other than virtual, with our own children or grandchildren or dear friends, and special praise and gratitude to those who could not, and did not, go to the hospital to hold the hands of family members who died alone. All praise and thanks to every one of them – and every one of us.

And, now, the criticism. This will be more of a challenge than a criticism, but I suppose challenging someone to do something – if it is something that they didn’t do but should have – is very much the same as criticism. Many states and localities are coming out of lockdown, and it might be too soon. There is as yet no vaccine; testing and tracking are still not widespread. In these circumstances, releasing everyone to mix and mingle, working, partying and going to school shoulder to shoulder may be nothing but an invitation to the virus to spread again, causing even more pain and death than it did the first time. But during the lockdown businesses have closed, people have lost their income, rent has gone unpaid and bills have piled up. Governments, economists, media pundits, all seem to see no solution to this other than to open the economy again. But there are other solutions; it is not too late to adopt them, and I challenge our government to do so. First, government should take on the duties that, during a national health emergency, rightfully belong to the government and not to private corporations that make decisions about health and welfare based solely on profit calculations. Government was created to serve the people, to protect and preserve their health, their property, and their safety.

Translated to COVID-19 terms, government should be paying everyone at least a sizeable percentage of the money they are losing from their paychecks and self-employment incomes. Government should either be supplying individuals and small businesses with the money they need to fend off landlords, mortgagees, credit card companies, auto dealers and other creditors or should be declaring a moratorium on those debts during the time that the economy is shut down. Not a delayed payment plan, but a total moratorium. Government should be making all health care and prescriptions free during the crisis, and should reimburse hospitals and individual practitioners a reasonable portion of the payments that a payment moratorium would take from them, so that those providers can continue to pay their own bills. Government should follow the example set by FDR and set up infrastructure projects all over the country so that people who have been furloughed from companies that have had to shut their doors can find solid, healthy and safe employment, and so that the country can come out of the pandemic better than it was when it went in. And, finally, government officials should provide people with clear, complete and thorough reports on the situation and should pledge to let their decisions about people’s lives be guided by science and medicine, not by a craven desire to help their electoral chances by pumping up the economy at all costs.

Okay, that is the criticism. Now, back to the praise — and the gratitude. Thanks to Persimmon Tree’s talented, generous, and loyal readers and contributors, we are now publishing another heart-wrenching, heartwarming, and utterly beautiful coronavirus supplement. We had originally intended these Persimmon Tree specials to be a gift from us to our readers, but they turned out to be gifts from our readers to us — and to one another. In the middle of this period of tremendous social aloneness, the editors and readers of Persimmon Tree have forged a new community – or perhaps just demonstrated what a strong, giving, and creative community we have been all along. In the spirit of that community – and as a thank you for the gift of your essays – Persimmon Tree’s very talented editors have graced this issue with gifts of our own to you. Cynthia Hogue is again giving us an ineffable reading of her poetry. And Gena Raps shares with us her insightful rendition of Brahms’ Capriccio in G Minor. Our delighted thanks to them both. And to all of you, readers and contributors alike. All praise to the people of Persimmon Tree.

March 19, 2020

The hardest part of today was Dad telling me not to come over. I had called him to announce I was. Sometimes I barge in. Sometimes I announce. He insisted I shouldn’t come, that it was dangerous and “against the rules.” At 92, he can be ornery and paranoid. But these times do call for orneriness and paranoia. I didn’t actually want to go over, had no particular mission, no groceries to deliver, no trash to take away, so in the moment of the call, I decided not to argue a) because he might be right – that because of all we don’t know about this thing, less contact is simply better and b) because he and Mom do not remember the content of arguments from one hour to the next. It is pointless for us to argue now. It is only important to laugh whenever possible.

Although Robin and I have sequestered from almost everyone, we had decided to treat my parents as “our household” even though they live for now in a different house. They have no help but us right now, although they manage most everything themselves.

Dad said I shouldn’t go over, and I agreed I wouldn’t, but then I did.

I was upset. I just wanted to see them, because the world is ending, and I knew that although they would likely not remember my explanation, I wanted to tell them why they should never be afraid of us, that it is okay for me and for Robin to visit. When I got there, they were sitting around the dining room table and I joined them. They seemed pleased that I’d dropped in. Though Mom was surprised – and I was surprised she remembered I’d said I wasn’t coming. Dad was finishing his “breakfast” which was soup. Mom had, hours before, finished her lunch. It was about 3 p.m. Dad had no memory of having told me not to come over. I felt compelled to go on with my explanation though I knew it was an exercise in futility. I talked way too much, but they tolerated it. We had a friendly exchange, though Dad couldn’t hear quite a bit of what I was explaining, and Mom repeated a good deal of it, acting as his personal hearing trumpet, and I then put up the poster that I had made with my five simple COVID-19 precautions.

“What are you doing now?” Mom called.

“I’m putting up a poster,” I said. I taped it to the kitchen cabinet. She thought that was funny.

“Why are you making fun of me?” I was irritated. “This is just to remind you what you can do during this time that we’re sequestering. It’s going to go on for a while.”

“You’re acting like my mother!” she said, shaking her head. “Hy,” she said, “Look how she’s bossing us around! She’s acting like my mother.”

He nodded vigorously, and seemed amused.

“Yep, get used to it,” I told them. “I’m going to be a bossy cow.”

I affixed an extra swath of tape to the top of the poster. “I came into this world disguised as your daughter, but now I’m your mother, and I’ll be telling you what to do. All for your own good, of course.”

We were all laughing by then, argument averted for the moment.

Then I was driving home, and the tears came. Perhaps because at the stoplight, I switched on the radio: Vivaldi’s Oboe Concerto in B-flat was underway. That, and an old man in an old car pulled up in the next lane over. He kept his gaze straight ahead, but he gave me his profile. A Roman coin. Temporarily unearthed. His face a Roman coin.

Recently, three things happened at once. Corona virus exploded around the world. I received a devastating letter from my grown son. My partner and I pretty much had to flee Mexico, where we’d been for three months while she taught at the University of the Yucatán. We were quarantined as soon as we got home and the world seemed to be tilting, and I was sliding off.

I began to read Dante’s Inferno, one of those poems I had promised myself I’d get to “later,” by sheer happenstance as I came across the first canto online and thought, “Yes, I know something of what the narrator is experiencing.”

How dark seems the world right now, how fearsome. What we knew as normal life has suddenly been upended. We collectively, but at different times, “came to” when we realized that the virus was no longer over there, and that we were deeply in the woods. What a slow, agonizing and hard awakening it was. Dante’s woods resonate with the ones we are in, “savage, dense and harsh –” so harsh that the narration itself re-traumatizes him.

In the midst of his lostness, Dante sees a hill’s “shoulders/ arrayed in the first light of the planet/ that leads men straight, no matter what their road.” Light! Hope! All he has to do is climb up, but he is thwarted by three wild animals. Terrified by their aggressive and threatening approach, he turns back in utter despair, driven “down to where the sun was silent.”

The silence of the sun (‘l sol tace) is such a provocative phrase. What is the language of the sun? And what is its silence? It has been said that a silent sun represents midday when it seems suspended and the temperature is at its hottest and most brutal. I also think of a silent sun as an absent one where no light exists, a place where darkness is, as Milton said, “visible.”

It is not a nice place to be.

And then something happens. Virgil’s ghost appears; Dante’s beloved Virgil comes not just to offer sympathy, but to guide him out of his misery. At first blush, the way out of the darkness and fear sounds as bad as what Dante’s current situation is: he must descend into Hell, witnessing the misery of the lost, understanding the reasons for their torment. The way out of darkness is through darkness.

Grim, I know. But there is something comforting about the fact that Dante the writer understood that none of us gets through our lives unscathed, that we need help from others and it is precisely from others that grace arrives. Virgil’s ghost accompanies him throughout the descent.

And so, the journey begins. Mine too. I still have several cantos to read before I see the outcome of Dante’s journey. I had to wait 14 days to find out if I was infected by the virus as I rushed to get out of Mexico – three airports, two planes, and exposure to a terrifying number of people. I’m still raw from the letter I received from my son. It’s going to be a rigorous journey to the sunlight.

Reading Dante’s gorgeous work (I’m using the bilingual edition of the Hollander translation, by the way) helps me situate my personal fear and anxiety about Chicago’s and the world’s growing and unstable horror, in the context of what it means to be human and vulnerable to a powerfully destructive viral entity so small it can only be apprehended under magnification; to be vulnerable to the pain of a grown child, pain in which I unknowingly played a role many years ago; to be vulnerable to the threat of a global economic collapse; to be vulnerable to death – and yet not as vulnerable as the millions of others with minimal or no resources.

Dante reminds me to think about the condition of being human and the need I have – we have – to connect with each other, to be agents of grace as we journey through whatever hell we find ourselves in until we can “see again the stars.”

I dread the morning phone call.

Joshua will want to know when this will be over and when he can come home. And now because he knows summer is near, when can he go to Okoboji, Iowa. Autistic and developmentally impaired, our son understands the limits of the quarantine but is not sure who is sick and has trouble grasping all the other vagaries of COVID-19.

We did all the right things at an early stage of the COVID-19 warnings. My husband closed his furniture store. “No one ever died because they didn’t have a bar stool,” he said. We bought a reasonable amount of groceries and supplies. We ordered books and tested our access to television movies.

Shannon, my son’s very competent and caring group home supervisor, called to tell us that the house’s management company announced a policy of no home visits and no contacts outside of the group home. I replied that we would instead bring Joshua home for the duration of this epidemic. She gently recommended that he stay at the group home with his easy-going housemates, the competent staff, and his routine. After twenty-four hours of soul-searching and family conference calls, I acquiesced. In normal times, he comes home every week-end, a ritual we all cherish. But we have become tired seventy-three-year-olds, and months of caretaking would strain us.

People with autism need routine. On weekends here, Joshua plays Wii by himself and Uno with us, bikes in good weather, washes cars with his sister. At night, we look for the North Star, which we named “the Joshua Star.” On Sunday, he and I “walk the churches,” a route that allows us to enjoy the bells and recorded music of at least six denominations.

He has now surrendered to a new routine. We FaceTime with him twice a day, as do his sisters and their families. He walks around his block and waves to his neighbors. Some know he loves seeing garage doors move and open theirs for him. The county sheriff sometimes turns on his flashers for him. These small acts manage, as he says, to “make my day.”

Creative and energetic new staff, who were laid off by non-profits that provide jobs to disabled clients, are supplementing their incomes and the house’s workforce. They take him on picnics and walks at uncrowded nature areas. They have made doggie treats with him and encourage him to do puzzles and interact with his roommates.

Joshua will come home. He will be disappointed that we cannot do his Okoboji routine of boats and old friends. His life will probably change in other ways. Work at his beloved sheltered workshop may be limited or impossible for a while. We will adjust. People with disabilities learn early in life about the limitations of their dreams.

Every night, when I let the dog out, I look directly at the brightest star in the sky, the Joshua Star. And wait for when I can show it to him again.

There he is, standing in the doorway, alert, willing, kind, honest, and I hope he goes away soon because I want minutes to myself, so I can read messages on the phone, the article about conspiracies in The Atlantic, the newsletters from the historian and the lawyer trying to make sense of this time. I want to read texts to make sure I haven’t made anyone mad, or email to make sure I’m not expected to do anything. I haven’t. I am not needed. I didn’t promise anyone something. And then he returns, ready for breakfast, which he makes, brings me cold coffee, which he makes. The door in my heart opens, a little.

But still. There’s my shower, my hearing aids to adjust, the bed to make. I’m late for breakfast.

When he was sick with COVID-19, quarantined in the guest bedroom, I’d check on him every few minutes. Always sleeping. The temperature at a constant 100. He ached. Sometimes he threw up. Tried to eat, couldn’t. He too has hearing aids, but is much deafer than I. So he couldn’t hear me while I raged at the news, at the motherfucker who was responsible for this, couldn’t hear me insane and ranting, willing to kill if anything happened to my beloved. And I was so inadequate. I couldn’t make anything he wanted to eat. I didn’t know how to make him comfortable. I didn’t know if I already had the virus, so I couldn’t kiss him. Or touch him.

Finally I just decided I must already be infected, and got into bed with him and held him. Now, he’s fine; I’m fine too, over my bout. Now, I go back to reading in bed in the morning, guarding my privacy, so that my heart doesn’t slide out of me and lay itself at his feet. Begging him, never leave me.

When I was four years old, my father took me clam digging in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and I looked for the magical bubbles, then dug for clams that I proudly brought home in my red bucket. Two weeks later, my parents were severely burned in the cellar of our rented cottage and disappeared for nine months. I learned that life can change in a millisecond and have always lived in that chiaroscuro world, aware of great joy and great sadness.

Now, the pandemic rages across the world. My husband and I, 76 and 70, and our small dog, Ella, live in Glen Park, San Francisco. We are unable to hug our daughters, unable to go to our grandsons’ graduations back East, unable to gather with friends, and unable to meet and greet our neighbors on the small streets that lead to the market or the bookstore. When I walk Ella, I’m a moving target, avoiding runners breathing heavily, or small clots of teenagers who walk too close. I rush by small children, where before I would smile. When dogs come too near, to play with Ella, I put my hands up – “Please, don’t come too near – thanks.” Some dogs have even carried the virus on their fur. At times, my eyes visible behind my mask, I thank those who move away, a small signal of humanity.

We are the lucky ones: we have a beautiful home, and enough food to eat. In the morning Jim and I sit on the couch, listen to Up First on NPR. Without a guaranteed income or health care for all, more people live on the margins or die needlessly, nurses holding their hands, their loved ones on FaceTime.

I do what I can to repair the world: sign petitions, buy books from my local bookstore. I talk often with my daughters, connecting through this new virtual world. hoping and praying that we all make it through. I make a list. Revise ten pages of my new memoir; get handouts together for a Zoom class I’m teaching; do an exercise tape; and lately, drive once a week out of our neighborhood to take a walk or hike.

Last week, Jim and I walked around Stowe Lake. Along the shores we saw mother geese, their babies clustered around them, an explosion of new life. Jim built me a flower box that sits on the middle patio. I’ve planted lettuce from seed. Now it’s sprouting. I’m excited each day to wake up and see more green sprouts. A small plant a friend gave us has finally flowered, one gorgeous purple blossom. It is these small moments of joy – the ability to comfort a child, to see that nature still dresses the world in all its spring finery – that bring me joy. When the dark feelings take over, I rest, talk to my loved ones, or write. We are all so fragile right now, as we’ve always been. But now, we truly need to care for each other, to finally repair the world.

I am at home in a comfortable house with my husband, dog, and cat. I am working online so all in all I am lucky and yet challenged by this pandemic existence.

For one thing, I am now cleaning my own house. I have been fortunate enough to have hired someone for many years, but now that the virus confines us all to home, the hardworking woman who cleans my house cannot come here. It has always made me uncomfortable not doing it myself. Such a privilege! Now I have to clean, and it is quite a workout. I am not paying her enough.

Removing the duvet from a king-size comforter, washing it, and then putting the comforter back inside requires technique. Even with a good plan, I am not strong enough.

As I make the bed I notice the nightstands need dusting. Vacuuming the floor leads to seeing that the windowsills need wiping down, that all the surfaces are dusty. I finally understand why my mother was always cleaning. Once you start there is no end.

Vacuuming the steps is particularly difficult. It requires dexterity and triceps strength that is considerable. The first time I do the steps between the first and second floor, I notice that the window on the landing, which I pass many times a day and evidently never look at, needs cleaning. This leads me to look around. All the windows need cleaning.

My husband is more than happy to disinfect, a manly task, but his everyday cleaning standards are mediocre, and our relationship cannot manage the discussion of “just what clean means.”

My husband is in charge of keeping the virus out of the house. I am often yelled at for some infraction of the rules. He is having the best time ever controlling our universe to protect us from the imminent threat of annihilation. The pandemic is a confirmation of his world view. He believes it will never be over. This will go on for months, maybe years. When he sees someone not wearing a mask he has a thing or two to say about the apocalypse and how this unmasked citizen is responsible for adding to the death toll.

The one infraction I am allowed is having my sister over to sit on the porch with me, masked and at least six feet away. The visits are lovely but I can’t hug her hello or goodbye or smack her arm when she says something annoying. It doesn’t feel right. The essence of most of my family visits are in the hug.

It’s been two months since I have hugged my daughter or granddaughter. My husband is an okay hugger but far from the best. My daughter’s hugs are brilliant and fill my soul. I would gladly clean my house for the rest of my life for the gift of hugs from my daughter and granddaughter.