COVID-19 has come to Ohio.
It’s all over the country now. Last I heard there was a case up in Canton, where I’ve never been but where my computer has decided I am: every time look at Google Maps, the map tells me that I live in the middle of a shopping center in Canton, Ohio, an hour’s drive away. That makes the matter feel even closer to home than it is.
Right up until the president’s speech last night, the comment section on any local news story about COVID-19 was full of people laughing and calling it a hoax. They said it was no more serious than a head cold; they repeated increasingly insane conspiracy theories claiming it was all made up by Democrats to throw the 2020 election their way. The moment the news announced the president’s travel ban, the comment section was full of people lauding him to the skies and saying the ban should be expanded; no one should enter the country at all. Everyone who had been certain that it was all lies was now certain it was real, and that it was the work of dirty foreign people.
I’m often shocked at how that omnipresent Northern Appalachian paranoia turns into blind, naive allegiance to an authority figure, if the authority figure is cruel enough. Fear of one thing instantly turns into fear of its opposite. People turn on a dime between incompatible conspiracy theories so easily.
This morning I had to go to the bank, and I wanted to go shopping. I would have liked to stock up for a few weeks in case of a catastrophe like my friends were doing, but I couldn’t afford to. We shop from week to week and sometimes day to day, because that’s what we can manage. Still, we needed milk and I’d promised Rosie I’d buy marshmallows.
I decided to walk because the sun was so beautiful. It was warm– unseasonably warm, another worrying thing I try not to think about lately. We barely had a winter to speak of this year, and today the low sixties felt like summer. I took my usual route through the Union Cemetery, where the grass is just beginning to go green but the trees haven’t budded yet. The fat robins are already back for the year; the woodchuck and squirrels are awake. There are still red vinyl Christmas poinsettias adorning some of the graves, and some already have white silk Easter lilies. The creek that runs under the old stone bridge was barely flowing. It was soothingly quiet and calm.
Inside the grocery store was a zoo. Some people were wandering the aisles in a state of shock. Some were gathered in little clots, talking, blocking the way. The entire toilet paper section was completely empty and desperate people were making a huge dent in the paper towels and disposable napkins, but nobody had thought to get flushable cleaning wipes– I grabbed three packages of those.
I got the marshmallows, the shampoo and conditioner, the frozen vegetables and the other things on my list. On a whim, I also picked up a large bag of chicken leg quarters I thought would last us the weekend.
“Public schools are canceled for a month, k through twelve,” said a well-dressed young woman. “I’m a teacher. They just texted me. I didn’t come here to stock up. I need toilet paper just for today.”
“Oh they planned this,” said another woman. “So that they could buy stock cheap. And the price of commodities is gonna go up, just watch.”
“It’ll blow over,” said somebody else. “You’ll see.”
An extremely scruffy man in the milk section was exclaiming the same hair-raising ableist slur over and over again. “Trump is r*****ed, you know? He’s just r*****ed.”
On any other day I would have snapped at him, but I was so overwhelmed I didn’t think to do so until I’d missed the opportunity.
I got to the self checkout as quickly as I could and started scanning.
As I lifted out the chicken leg quarters, I saw that the bag had an enormous hole. Pink fluid gushed out all over the scanner and the floor, drenching my arm and dotting the shampoo bottle I was holding.
I stood there motionless, dripping blood that wasn’t mine, until a clerk came over with a roll of paper towels. She wiped up the mess apologetically; she sprayed Lysol on the scanner, my arms, and the bottle. I rubbed the Lysol into my skin like sanitizer because I didn’t know what else to do. I paid for my groceries and went to the bathroom to scrub down like a surgeon– contemplating all the while that if I died of salmonella, COVID-19 wouldn’t have a chance to get me.
There has never been a human being who wasn’t in danger of a terrible death. We are all fragile things at the best of times. Every once in awhile we realize this and panic. We do wise things to put it off, like washing our hands; we also do stupid things like hoarding toilet paper. But we’re always in danger. Our lives are tragic, horrifying, funny, a madcap nightmare comedy that will end suddenly one day and we will find that every moment we lived was pregnant with value and meaning. Part of us goes under the ground, and those who are left alive cover the ground with vinyl Christmas poinsettias and silk Easter lilies and try to think about something else. The other part goes to a place no mortal tongue can describe, awaiting the day when the stars begin to fall.
As I scrubbed my hands, I was too vigorous with the bathroom soap and got suds on my blouse. There were no paper towels in the dispenser, so I walked out soaking wet, feeling like Lady Macbeth if I didn’t look like her.
Clouds rolled in as I waited for the bus, and then it was evening, and then it rained, and it was night.
Image via Pixabay
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross.
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