It’s been a while since I’ve written about anything other than food, so I think I owe you an update.
This week I will start composing my Year-End lists for beer and music. As I haven’t been in the office since March (and not listening to Spotify 6-8 hours a day) I don’t think I can find 100 albums to include this year. I can easily find 50 though, so 2020 might break with my annual tradition. Ten beers shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve been drinking almost nightly through the pandemic.
The last quarter of 2020 has been incredibly tough and tumultuous. Several months ago my father was diagnosed with an aortic abdominal aneurism. He had a procedure to correct it, and was recovering well until a week before Thanksgiving. Apparently a blood clot developed in his leg and went undiagnosed by his doctor. It traveled to his lung, and while he was out running errands one afternoon he collapsed. Thank God police responded to someone’s call and rushed him to the emergency room. Once there, he received a treatment to break up the clot. The treatment seemed to work, but the recovery took more than 3 weeks. He was released this past Friday and is recovering at home now. It’s not going to be an easy recovery. After so many days in the hospital he doesn’t even have the strength to get upstairs to bed, so a hospital bed has been set up in the living room. At least he’s well enough to be home, and no longer in the hospital. I’m happy for that little victory.
We also lost a close family friend to COVID during the time dad was in the hospital. He lived around the corner from us growing up and was my father’s best friend. The two of them met for brunch or dinner sometimes twice a week. He isn’t the first person I know who has passed away from this bug this year. His passing just hits close to home for my whole family.
As I write this, another incredibly close family friend — my mom’s best friend — is in the hospital with COVID. I spoke to him the other day by phone and he mentioned only feeling discombobulated. His doctors were a little more concerned because he’s in his 80s and diabetic, but hopefully he’s in the right place getting the right treatment and can fully recover soon.
We all probably have similar stories to share at this point. As 2020 has worn on my stress and anxiety levels have increased exponentially. With each piece of news from home and each local surge, so too has my anxiety surged. I wish the only item on my plate right now was managing my own mental wellbeing, but watching my family suffer from afar has only served to compound my sense of helplessness, fear, and melancholy. We managed to remain relatively unscathed from March through the summer, but the fall and winter have proven exponentially more difficult.
I do not often think about the distance between Los Angeles and New Jersey. In these unprecedented times, though…I find myself thinking more and more about how far away 3,000 miles feels. At least once daily I find myself saddened by my inability to be there to help. For three weeks my father’s hospital stay filled me with a sense of utter helplessness. I can FaceTime him, and check in daily for progress reports, but even that is a daily reminder of how powerless I am to aid his recovery. Every day my mom is out running this or that errand, and it fills me with dread she’ll be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’s already had two direct exposures through no fault of her own, and thankfully she tested negative in both situations. I don’t even like running errands here in Los Angeles, but if I was in NJ I could at least lessen the burden on her a tiny bit.
As of today it is being reported that less than 1 out of every 150 people in LA County is considered to be contagious right now. We are lucky that neither of us really have to interface with anyone for work. At most we interact with one or two people per week because of our jobs. Even so we have each had recent scares with co-workers contacting us to say that they had been exposed. Imagine taking this thing so seriously that you only see one other human in the span of a week — for work, masks on, socially distanced — and that one person texts you the next day to say they’re sorry but they just found out they were exposed a few days ago. It’s infuriating, and heartbreaking, and unbelievable, and so many emotions all at once.
I know I stopped writing daily updates back around the time our lockdown ended, but we never really escaped that mindset. We spent the summer looking for a house, but our interactions were only with our real estate agent, always following mask/distance rules. When we moved in and had to hire workers to install appliances or fix things we enforced mask-wearing, kept interactions to outdoors, and sterilized spaces like we were literally living in a hospital ward. Even when restaurants re-opened for outdoor service only we stayed home. I’ve seen my buddy Nate twice, once from his car to my porch, and vice versa. I’ve bumped into Mark and David walking their dog in our neighborhood twice or three times since October. I haven’t seen a single other friend in LA since March. Only over Zoom. I’ve been to Trader Joe’s twice since March. All other groceries and supplies have been ordered through apps or weekly/monthly drops from subscription services. Watching the county around us surge to 15,000+ cases a day is mind-boggling. Seeing 0% ICU capacity in Southern California today is terrifying. We know we are incredibly lucky to still have jobs, to be able to work from home, and have the money/resources to sustain ourselves without having to physically leave our bubble. And yet we never feel totally safe. There really isn’t any other way to say it: Everything is so fucked.
As 2020 ends, I hope all of you reading this have stayed happy and healthy this past year. And I hope for your continued happiness and healthiness until we can conquer this in 2021. I’ll quit with the solipsism now. I have one more restaurant review to post this week and then I’ll start rolling out the Year End lists.
Happy Holidays, Y’all.
