Great Outdoors

We've been at home for five weeks now, at least. Joe has classes and services and runs a  a bit of Sunday school. I'm working on a list of about 212 counties I thought might be better places to live than Morgantown. What I've learned from my list is that this is where we live now, and starting over, unless it is specifically in a gay retirement community, is not a good idea. Just today, I looked at Island County, Washington, county seat Coupeville, largest city, Oak Harbor. The weather is mild there, the current President received fewer votes than his opponent, but not by much, and Washington is a gay-friendly state. Still, there is no synagogue there, which is a deal-breaker, and really, we are not going to pack up all our stuff and move back to the West Coast. We are just not going to do that.

I attended a funeral on Zoom from Los Angeles last Sunday, led by the interim rabbi at Beth Chayim Chadashim, where I have been a member since 1987, and the cantor, a friend, who has been there at least eleven years. There were sixty cameras on, and I knew probably 57 of the people from my time in Los Angeles. I think the man who died, Bruce Weil, had a heart attack, because he had not been ill. I met him more than thirty years ago, and although I always thought he was older than I am, I think he was a year or two younger, so late sixties. He was an argumentative sort of stereotypical New Yorker, but also kind and generous. I found out that he had cared for a woman I knew in L.A, who was not well when we left town ten years ago, and died after being committed to a nursing home. I also know that he donated money to the temple for our anniversary a few times. I never would have gone to Los Angeles for this funeral, so I'm glad it was on Zoom. I loved seeing so many people I know online, my real long-time friends. We have congregants here we are close to, and there is a gay social group where we have made some friends we dearly love, but it can't be the same as people we've known for thirty years, and it makes me sad to be away from these people.

A lot is going on in the City of Morgantown, where I am on the Council. Tension between some of us on Council and the City Manager have arisen over a lack of information, and Council is being blamed for decisions we did not make. The Manager has taken a job in his native Michigan, and given  notice, and just this week, the Police Chief tendered his resignation. The City  is being sued for what seems like an exorbitant amount of money. Lots of work and not a lot of fun.

I'm teaching a class at Osher Life-Long Learning that just started, also on Zoom, about pop music in 1968. It's not the same as being live, but it's not bad. The people at OLLI have helped me with the technical stuff. If you want to know what I played this week, go to You Tube and type in "The Great Hits And Albums of 1968 Week One," and videos of all the songs should pop up.

We have been running to the grocery twice a week, although not all of the employees and customers wear masks or socially distance. Grocery shopping feels reckless. We picked up Indian food for dinner. I noticed that our next-door neighbor had pizza delivered tonight. It's the macho in me, which I have tried to kill off several times, that won't let me have people bring food to my door. I don't want to feel like an invalid, although my life will be at risk if I get Covid-19.

Today was the first warm day in a few weeks, and I asked Joe to go to WVU's Core Arboretum, on a hillside overlooking the Monongahela River about a mile and a half from here. The spring wildflowers, early this year, are still blooming, and we ran into our friends Zack and Annie Fowler and their two kids, keeping a distance from them. Zack is the Director of the Arboretum, and he pointed out an owl he named Aldo living in a hole in a tree. We also saw, masked, West Virginia House of Delegates member  Barbara Evans Fleischauer, who had a question for Joe about a program that might happen at the synagogue in the fall. So although we complain that we don't know people here, we do. I put up pics from Core Arboretum at the end of this post.

I've been doing a run and walk through the neighborhood, and today I broke a record by doing it in seventeen minutes and thirty-eight seconds. I'm not sure of the distance, but it might be two miles. Thee is one hill I can't (and shouldn't) run, but I can now run the rest of the course. I do the same course every time, and thanks to the changing season, I can see different things blooming over the last few weeks, and leaves starting to sprout. I say "Hello" to a few dogs along the way, all fenced or chained, and many of the ones who used to bark angrily at me no longer do.

So this is our life now. We still have an income, we can still pay our mortgage and we have health insurance. We had $2400 deposited to our joint checking account. I plan to spend mine to help certain political candidates. At this point, I think that is the best thing I can do.

Here are the pics from Core Arboretum:

Hard to see, but there is an owl in that tree

Still Locked Up

Looking at my last few blog posts, I see that in mid-March the temperature in Morgantown was in the seventies and eighties. April is running thirty degrees cooler, rainy and overcast.  There are only eighty-three confirmed COVID-19 cases in Monongalia County, but that is eighty-three times the one case we had a month ago. Two counties in West Virginia, both somewhat larger than ours, have more cases, and their number of cases is rising more rapidly. I would suggest that people here are more immune, not to the virus, but to the talking heads of Fox News and the White House who think we should just go about our business and let people die.

We are both busy. Joe is teaching and leading services. I have city council business to deal with and a meeting coming up Tuesday. I will be at an online funeral tomorrow for a long-time acquaintance in Los Angeles who died this week, and my postponed class at Osher Life-Long Learning, "The Great Hits And Albums of 1968," starts online this coming Friday. I have learned to use Facebook Live, Zoom and Cisco Webex. For me, all this isolation is a taste of the world to come, not the afterlife, but the time when I'm really retired and can sit home and read books and not have to be anywhere.

I've been taking my temperature and monitoring my breathing. My temperature has not gone over 98 F.  My breathing has been impaired from the dust in the house, from running on windy, pollen-strewn days, and from Joe occasionally adding an unfamiliar spice to his cooking. I always think I have "it," but I recover quickly.

Our Governor, Jim Justice, a liar and long-time grifter like the President, has at least expressed an interest in keeping people healthy, and not rushing to "reopen" the economy, unlike protestors in Ohio who look like zombies, and in Michigan, who were apparently paid for by someone who works for Betsy DeVos. And don't get me started on the talking heads who say we would only lose one to two percent of the school kids if we opened schools now, or that killing off old people to save the economy is a fair bargain. I plan to stay in until everyone can be tested and there is a vaccine.

I miss my trips to counties within three hundred miles of here, and I miss the library and sitting in a restaurant or walking around the mall. I'd like my class to be live. I've said before that we are privileged because our income and health insurance are stable, and we have enough space to not be tripping over each other at home. I've come to appreciate Joe more, because I see more of his work, and he has gone out of his way to be considerate and helpful. I can't imagine being without him. And I have to give shout-out to Tappuz Katom, our cat, who seems to alway show up when one of us is looking for company.

When this is over, I hope to do less, drive less, buy less, be more environmentally aware. Shutting things down has created cleaner air, given a break to wildlife in the oceans and on land. Maybe our whole economy needs to take a breath and wind down. I'll take my twelve hundred dollars and give it to local people running for office to make West Virginia a place I would be proud to call home.

Passover 5780

Passover this year will go down as one of the strangest since... Moses and the Israelites left Egypt. The comparisons I've seen are to people in hiding from the Nazis trying to create some semblance of a holiday, or concentration camp inmates eating forbidden bread or fasting on Passover. We are locked in. Not completely here in West Virginia, where we can go out to get some exercise and fresh air, and can run to the grocery store as long as we stay apart. But we can't gather in large groups for a seder, can't get together with friends and family, can't have a caterer do all the cooking and serving.

We're privileged that we can still have a seder at all. At Tree of Life here in Morgantown, Rabbi Joe will do a short seder on social media. He and I will have a simple Passover meal after the formal seder. Our cleaning woman offered to come this coming week, and the house could use a pre-Passover cleanse. I plan to tell her not to come, and we will do what we can to get the bread crumbs out before the holiday.

Joe and I are not suffering materially. Our income and health insurance are not threatened, we don't owe money except the mortgage, which is less than most people here pay for rent. Joe did say something about having to put up with me all the time. I could say that about him, too.

There is the strangeness of it all. We both went to the grocery store Sunday, early "before the crowds." Yet the store was crowded. Half of the people there were wearing masks and gloves. People looked away or frowned if they thought I was getting too close. The cashiers had a glass wall up between them and us, and after years of bringing reusable bags, we are being told not to.

In our state, it seems like overreaction. Almost all of the thirty-five cases here in Monongalia County were in one nursing home. Only one person has died. Berkeley and Kanawha counties, both with larger population than our county, now have more cases. Testing in West Virginia is limited, and results can take eleven days, so who knows? The news from larger cities is so grim that it strikes fear into my heart. Most of the cases are mild unless one is over seventy or has underlying heart, lung or immune system problems. Check, check, check and check.

I've been running and walking about twenty minutes every day lately. I take the same route, running until it hurts, then walking the uphill parts. Given a choice, I would rather drop instantly from a heart attack while running then die with a tube down my throat, in a hospital, unable to breathe.

The point of Passover is staying alive and being careful. Moses' sister puts him in a basket, the Israelites are saved from death over and over. We celebrate being alive. We have to be grateful at this season for what we have, create new memories of a very different Passover, and take the precautions we can.

I wish my Jewish readers a memorable Passover, and my Christian readers, a meaningful holiday season this week.