Lessons From Quarantine

On March 8, 2020, I went to dinner at a lovely restaurant with 16 friends and acquaintances from my Widows/Widowers group. On March 10, 2020, I did not give it a second thought when my quarterly supply of toilet paper, paper towels, and tissues, arrived on my doorstep from Amazon. On March 12, 2020, I woke up to find myself a character in a Stephen King novel set in the Twilight Zone.

I remembered the bewilderment and confusion on the faces of the protagonists on the Twilight Zone TV show when they realized they were trapped in an alternate universe where nothing was familiar or reasonable. I remembered the terror of the inexplicably immune heroes in Stephen King’s novels as they tried to flee a virus that killed everyone in their town except them. I remembered their horrified reactions when they realized it was not only their town that was affected but the entire planet.

In March, April, May of 2020, and beyond……….I watched, in real-time, the TV news reports showing restaurants, bars, schools, theaters, gyms…………everything shut down in the WORLD, as the entire worlds’ population quarantined in their homes. I felt the same bewilderment and confusion as the characters in the TV and novels I mentioned above. For the first week, I thought I could go to sleep and wake up the next day to normalcy, breathing a sigh of relief that it had all been a horrible nightmare. I tried it. I went to sleep, woke up the next day, turned on the TV, and to my dismay, discovered that it had not been a nightmare. Well, not a sleeping one anyway. It was a real one, one in which I was as trapped as those characters in the Twilight Zone TV show and Stephen King novels.

20 months, countless video doctor appointments, various Zoom get togethers, a new start to my stalled writing career, precious bi-weekly in person meetings with a select group of “Bubble Buddies”, and 3 full vaccinations later, my life, priorities, and understanding of my parent's generation have been altered forever. Here are the top 10 lessons that these months have taught me:

1. I only need 3 sheets of toilet paper to do the job on which I used to waste 6.

2. It is better to keep track of paper goods ( as in counting toilet paper rolls every month) as you go along, and buy one package each week, rather than try to stock up when the shelves are bare.

3. Although it astounded me at the time, I now understand why my Auntie Freida, who grew up during the Depression, reused unstained aluminum foil. I used to watch in fascination as she would remove it from a covered dish, fold it up, and put it into a drawer to be used later. “It’s wasteful to throw away perfectly good, usable foil”, she told me. As I have come to learn, especially if, in the years 2020 and 2021, there isn’t any on the grocery store shelves.

4. Gray hair is not that terrible. Okay, well, I say this as I never go out in public without my blonde wig, BUT that is because when I recovered from a series of illnesses and came off of my medications, my hair grew back smooth on one side, spiked on the other, and frizzy on top. Gray hair is one thing; a Heinz 57 Variety hairdo is quite another, and one I am not comfortable displaying to the public.

5. I still hate certain household chores and being afforded an unlimited amount of time to tackle them does not mean I spent my quarantined time doing them. Almost 9 months into this pandemic, my garage still looked like an episode of Hoarders and my office was still buried under 5 years of paperwork.

6. Sitting and resting are overrated. I love to sit and read….and knit….and write, but not 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. So I got up and out, and that is how I ended up walking 5 miles at a time four days a week.

7. Paying $60 for a restaurant meal that fits into a teacup is just plain foolish. I am rediscovering cooking, and it’s not so bad. Since my bariatric surgery and massive weight loss, I am limited in what I can eat. Cooking my own meals assures me that the food is clean and healthy. Even though restaurants SAY a dish is “healthy” and low in sodium, it’s their version of “healthy”, which means it contains ¼ cup of salt instead of ½ a cup. I always come home from a restaurant meal with fingers so bloated I can’t bend them.

8. I am deafer than I thought. Before the pandemic, I was aware that my hearing was not all it should have been. Either that or the entire population was whispering. But now, trying to hear what people are saying with masks covering their mouths is a Herculean task that has me bending forward, leaning in, and turning my head like a curious dog, somehow thinking that will increase the volume of their voices. It doesn’t.

9. Online shopping is a quick and easy pathway to bankruptcy.

10. And the best lesson I have learned during my quarantined time is…………One does not have to get on the scale during a VIRTUAL doctor visit!!!!