“Being of two minds” has a ring to it, but misses a strategic something I call my SELF. I tend toward the comforts, regulations that have brought me thus far. Mind, however, or brain, tends toward updates from TV and the Times, truths that SELF wants to negate, the better to stick with my mother’s belief that God’s in His heaven, “all’s right with the world.” (Robert Browning wrote it; my SELF wants to go along, but BRAIN is warning, “Wait just a cotton pickin’ minute!”)
There’s a line in Hamlet, Act I that goes, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” Marcellus said it. But why? (I reread Act I searching for the why and found it. There’s contagion in the land allowing ghosts (and viruses?) to roam abroad. Reason enough to quote the bard, but there’s another reason to recall that line. I’ll explain anon.”
Back to SELF. Yes, my personal being is bracing to face the pandemic that has emptied ancient and modern Rome of life that’s been known there. No place to bury the victims. That’s what BRAIN is hearing from TV, and I’m being told to “shelter in place” because the virus that killed those Italians is already in New York City, limiting my socializing to 10! (I don’t have 10 friends to avoid, but the handful I do have are under the same mandate. They’re at home washing their hands and avoiding door knobs. SELF resents MIND’s scary news! I mean, a whole lot of good it did for Italy! I vow to list the wishy-washy truths intended to fog up my brain with pleasantries: “as soon as possible”, “with all due expediency”, “we’re working on that”, “we’ll see what happens and let you know the latest as soon as tests become available.” (BRAIN input starts burrowing into SELF with images of Rome, with the fountains turned off.)
Am I really putting on my shoes to go food shopping without a mask? I saw no masks during yesterday’s foray for eggs, potatoes and toilet tissue, so it can’t be bad as all that! Anyway, there are no masks to be had. I’d always made my own clothes, so SELF’s fashioning a fold of tissue held in place over nose and mouth with rubber bands seemed a no brainer ’til advised by a medical professional that Kleenex was no barrier against “incoming fire,” effective only if I’m the sneezer.
(But might it frighten the virus away?) Don’t count on it, and don’t count on attempted humor to lighten the mood of the world in the spring of 2020 (’cause too much is not right with it!)
MIND persuaded me to make a run for groceries, thinking of eggs as a substitute protein, and potatoes with butter and sour cream to fill the plate. Though maskless, I blend right in. Not one mask on the sidewalk! (That’s SELF talking, trying to maintain normalcy in times of stress.) But inside, BRAIN snaps back, “A Ha! Not one egg to be had, NOR a lowly potato. SELF says, “Did I get it wrong? Who said, ‘On a wartime footing, on the way to becoming Italy!'”
Early Saturday, confident but concerned, I took up my cart for a more successful foray for food. Ahead, a block-long line-up of produce trucks unloading sacks of potatoes to feed the regiment of men on a relay line! I watched awed, wanting to say “thank you, guys,” but how? Blow a kiss to the incredible scene, (even with the intrusive picture of an empty Italian street over my shoulder.)
And inside? Eggs! In pastel-colored cartons! (Intended for Easter?) Stacked higher than I could reach! That’s better! More like my America. “We will get through this together.” Those men out there, lifting, tossing, toting, stocking the shelves are but one unsung link in the enormous “together” that, the pundits say, will bring us to the “other side.” By summer?
Eggs and potatoes, fine for two weeks, but what of the newly projected months? And how to ration 24 eggs and a sack of potatoes till July? I’d dress up a bed of spinach with slices of hard boiled eggs! Nutritious, even attractive. (I am whistling in the dark.) As for potatoes, butter and sour cream would have to do. Breakfast? With 12 English muffins and 10 packets of grits on hand, I fell to pretending I was well provisioned, even predicting I’d end up with a surplus.
The news coverage: so repetitive when not downward plunging. Cowardly, I turned away from the battle of SELF’s “sunny side of life,” versus BRAIN’s surreal reality of spring 2020, to feel a welcome spurt of energy for tackling a physical chore. I’d wash the windows! Nobody had warned of a Windex shortage. While sheltering in place, I’ll have a clearer view of the greening wisteria vine come spring. (SELF says there will be Spring. BRAIN? Not so much.)
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Emma Ody Pohl is a legend. Everybody ever affiliated with The W knows that. She was not of this world. Trust me. I’d never been one of her dancers… knew her only from afar. I kept my distance so I could watch her walk across campus accompanied by a breeze tugging at the hem of her navy blue coat, and strands of her graying hair. She was no friend of modernity that might loosen strictures on rules of dating, of allowing cars on campus, of handsome Air Force Cadets at the wheel.
I came upon her at the corner one Saturday. The noon whistle had sounded, the campus gates were opened allowing the inflow of cars, driven by handsome “fly boys” from CAFB to pick up their dates for the weekend. She stood there, in the date-charged atmosphere ’til it fanned out to the several dorms.
“Something is rotten,” she said, shading her eyes from the noon sun, “but it’s not in Denmark.” She wasn’t speaking to me. I was just there, but somehow I dared, “Excuse me Miss Pohl?”
“Never mind, Shakespeare said it. It’s in there somewhere, or was”. She crossed over in that breeze that stirred the leaves at her feet. “Denmark” was the only clue she’d left me, hence my search of “Hamlet.”
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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