The snow began falling as we started our Sunday evening, soon to pile high into a near record-breaking snowfall the next day. People talked about the food delivery orders they made in preparation for a day or two in and how much to tip their delivery people on a difficult night. We talked about the ridiculously long lines at all the supermarkets, already too long on Sunday nights, as the stores need to parse in COVID compliant numbers, now augmented by the anticipation of being snowbound. Strange that even when the homebounding will be only for a day the inclination to huddle and hoard kicks in, honed by the longer lockdowns of the Spring.
Several people on the call had visited a couple museums over the weekend, the craving for art viewing in live form having been compounded by nearly a year’s seeming deprivation. A few followed a friend’s lead to view stained glass, modern at the Museum of Art & Design done leadless on standing screens by an artist named Brian Clark and some much more ancient, from back in Egypt and Renaissance, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Others caught the last days of a special exhibit of Latin American art at the Whitney. Hearing their reports of their experiences kind of mitigated the not-going for the rest of us.
We talked about how this COVID time continues, how we’re losing nearly a 9/11’s worth of lives every day. Our Zooms will keep going for better or worse, and the ladies among us discussed the best Zoom-box makeup and hair tips we picked up along this time. I personally favor lipstick at minimum, and some light eye shadow if you want to do just a bit more. We talked about the food hoarding, and the amount we don’t get around to eating and that goes bad in our refrigerators, the ensuing clean-up and the guilt we feel for letting it happen. We talked about using “doggy bags” at restaurants, how that’s not really done in Europe, maybe because their portions are smaller, or maybe because they just think it’s tacky, and how PETA objects to using “doggy bag” as it’s perhaps pejorative to pets, which of course elicited some verbal eye rolls.
This week starts an initiative in New York that replaces the city’s Restaurant Week with a special take-out menu, and we talked about the pros and cons of take-out, the environmentally incorrect packaging and how the food arrives a bit colder and not presented the way the chefs would have preferred, and yet it gives us access to the magnificent meals we miss. We veered to Valentine’s Day dinners, the restaurant meals, the greeting cards, how we liked it, or didn’t, and memories of being a little kid and distributing the punch out cardboard cards to our classmates. Then somehow we wandered into the best weapons, I guess triggered by memories of unpleasant exes, from icicles from murder mysteries to pranks involving frozen lids of pee slipped under college dorm room doors, and that insulin used to be the preferred murder weapen in old Sherlock Holmes stories because at the time they were written it was untraceable.
Somehow the prank memories brought up elementary school abuse of substitute teachers, about teacher tantrums and breakdowns we as kids didn’t understand at the time, but to revisit as adults elicited more compassion and understanding, and in a collective chat like this, some momentary contemplation. Someone out of the blue asked me what made me proud of my parents, of whom I’m proud as both are accomplished physicians, and I mentioned my father more than twenty years ago received an “official blessing” by the Pope for having treated a member of the clergy with some pull. That had us wander into other religious experiences, like others who received touristic Papal blessings in Rome, and religious weddings, then we talked about a naked wedding one attended and then events at universities where students were encouraged to show up naked, and of course drunk. We figured out many of those events have since been non-continued now with more understanding of abuse that happens under the cover of “just for fun,” and also more likely the possible memorialization of compromising positions too easily done by all of us with our cell phones.
We touched a little on how the internet pushed up the Gamestop and AMC stock and whether that would matter long term. Then we talked about vaccine logistics again and the ethics of “jumping the lines.” Someone mentioned they had seen a 60 Minutes episode about how the companies collecting DNA data are selling it, or even merging with drug companies who would use the collected data, and that information, data about anything, is the new currency. We talked about the ethics of using knowledge about our DNA and that the HIPPA laws would probably not protect us, and how Apple and Facebook have already compromised our privacy.
From there we talked about hunkering down for the snow day the next day, as we saw the flakes fall outside our windows. Popcorn was brought up as a great hunker-at-home aid. I shared my “recipe” for popping with oil and herbes-de-Provence, people reminisced about the smell of microwave popcorn permeating their non-remote offices and our then aggravation about it and now longing for it, and again back to our dorm rooms and the smell of air popped popcorn. We talked about our memories of snow days, of waiting for it to be announced on local radio and television shows, about the old school “phone chains” before the internet made it all so much easier. Someone from Chicago said they’d close schools for extreme cold even without snow. Our regular who hails from Finland remarked that she never had a snow day, that when she was a kid people would just ski into school over the snow. She shared this as if it was quite unremarkable but the rest of us responded otherwise. We wondered whether snow days would be a thing of the past now that remote school and work has been established.
We pined for summer a bit, and somehow hitchhiking came up which some of us explored as kids, though we wondered whether people dared do that much now. A couple who’d just traveled to Costa Rica said they saw someone hitchhiking and thought to pick him up, but opted to not. Someone mentioned they did this on a golf trip, and then someone talked about a recent HBO Tiger Woods documentary and how his father was a bit pushy, a stage dad, and we talked about other famous celebrities with pushy stage parents many of whom befriended each other later, like Brook Shields and Andre Aggasi, who then went on to marry Steffi Graf, who also had a pushy parent. Our regular then again dug out for us a picture of him and her from many years ago when she met him on some local tennis courts, his memory was that she was kind, very pretty, but not so enthusiastic about having to practice tennis, and we noticed he was sporting a quite pronounced fanny pack. We all agreed that we heard that Federer and Rafa seemed to enjoy playing and practicing tennis.
The mention of Costa Rica had our friends who recently traveled there bounce out of and back to their Zoom box to demonstrate a pretty nifty science-y demonstration. They’d noticed that the black sand at a beach where they’d been stuck to the magnetized buckles of a sandal, so they brought some back and put it in a big round glass flower jar. When a magnet is glided along the jar the sand jumps up in twisted clumps to meet it, and is pretty cool to look at.
As the snow got heavier we wondered about the suburbs and shoveling, mocked our friends who put themselves in a suburban living position, and worried about our elder parents who insist on shoveling their driveways themselves. We ended the call with everyone enthusiastically volunteering to collectively call my parents and “yell at them” to not shovel themselves, which although would likely not work, would be worth mentioning to them.
