Posted on

A Journal of the Plague Year 2020–chapter 69

Anyone for bluefish–or brownies?

Sunday, May 17

Having read my blog entry about the Home, Sweet Home Cook Book, a friend has emailed me information about a Hamptons artists’ cookbook, Palette to Palate. It was published by Guild Hall Museum in 1978, contained recipes from 130 local artists, and featured illustrations and autographs from Andy Warhol, the de Koonings, and Lee Krasner. The recipes tend to be a little more sophisticated than those in Home, Sweet Home: Krasner’s contribution, for example, was a “hominy puff with cheese, herbs, or crabmeat.” Art-book dealer Argosy lists a first edition of the book as available for $4,000.

Back to grimmer stuff.

Emily has e-mailed me a Twitter timeline of New York City pandemic developments starting in March. It seems that for once in our lives at least, we’ve been ahead of events.

We came out to East Hampton on March 5—the first New York City case of COVID-19 had been reported on March 1. On March 7, two days after we came out, the governor declared a state of emergency in New York State, and five days later he banned any gatherings of more than 500 people. 

That same day, March 12, Mayor de Blasio declared a state of emergency in New York City, and the next day, it was announced that New York State had the most cases of the disease in the U.S., as new cases jumped 30% overnight. (And these, as I always have to remind myself, were just the reported cases. Many people had it but were asymptomatic.)

On March 20, Cuomo ordered nonessential businesses to keep 100% of their workforces at home. By the end of the month, New York State had become the coronavirus epicenter of the world, as its number of COVID-19 cases exceeded those in China’s Hubei province where the outbreak began.

Only on April 15 did Cuomo order everyone to wear face masks. Today, epidemiologists make a convincing case that THIS and social distancing are the most important things of all. 

One problem of course was the shortage of masks. Officials were saying to leave the available masks for the professionals who really need them; don’t try to hoard masks; wear a bandana around your face, make your own mask, etc. Vendors began offering lots of homemade masks online, and Emily ordered several for us on April 16.

On May 1, Cuomo announced that public schools in the state would remain closed for the rest of the school year.

By mid-May, 1.8 million state residents had filed unemployment claims—six times the number filing claims during the 2008 financial crisis.

And that brings us to where we are. 

The timeline is a bit puzzling to me: Events seem to move both quickly and slowly at the same time. 

The first case appeared in China in December of last year. In the U.S., the first confirmed case came in Washington State in late January of this year. There was a surge of cases in Italy in February.

Still, no one in this country paid much attention until March, when events really intensified. Then—I know, I’m repeating myself—it took until mid-April for New York to make the wearing of masks mandatory. 

There must be lessons here, and I’m sure the experts will offer us lots of them in time.

Dinner: lots of leftovers that don’t necessarily go together—mozzarella and tomato salad with balsamic dresssing, corn muffins, roasted brussel sprouts, baked potatoes with sour cream, and guacamole.

Entertainment: episodes of the Netflix nature documentary Our Planet narrated by David Attenborough and more episodes of Occupied.

Posted on

A Journal of the Plague Year 2020–chapter 66

Buddy Guy needs to read this blog post.

Thursday, May 14

The demise of clothing retailer J. Crew threatens to leave us with a cultural void: color-branding.

J. Crew, particularly in its catalog, was in the vanguard of color-branding. They were never satisfied to have a pair of shorts or a shirt in Olive or Khaki. No, instead the item would be listed as available in Basil or Sand—maybe even Mojave. (These are just fictitious examples I’ve come up with, mind you.)

So, the question arises: What would be some new color names appropriate to our fraught moment? Yesterday, I came up with one: First Responder Orange. Today, I’m thinking of others: Gilets Jaunes Yellow, for the French vest-wearing, economic-justice protest movement. And Pandemic Green, for that color that you might see in photos of microscopic slides. 

Trying to come up with an appropriate name for a blue hue, Emily hits upon another notion: Shouldn’t we have some blues songs associated with our quarantine experience? Forget “Hesitation Blues” or “Crossroads Blues.” How about “Peapod Perplexity Blues”?

Got my pencil and paper, babe,

I’m gonna jot me down a list.

Yeah, I got a pencil and paper,

I’m needin’ you to assist.

Artichokes and sun-dried tomatoes,

without such stuff, we just can’t exist.

[next verse]

Maybe green peas and Jarlsberg,

eggs and walnuts we really need.

Garlic, yeast, and lemons,

cabbage, cukes, and cheddar cheese.

But that Peapod manager

he’s always giving us more green beans.

(and we’ve got three packs already!)

[bridge]

Haagen-Dazs and Keebler Sandies,

wheat flour and bread crumbs too.

Chicken broth and shiitakes,

and some of that Tahini goo.

[final verse]

Yes, I got my pencil and paper, baby

I’m ready to make us a list…

Hmmm, maybe Buddy Guy could use this.

Other ditties could include”Dr. Fauci’s Lament” or maybe “Damark Disappointment Blues,” named for the small store that I go to when Peapod fails. Damark also has been known to fall short, notably when it comes to ramen. But they do just fine when it comes to fresh vegetables, walnuts, and napkins.

Ramen? They say no man,

this store ain’t where that’s at.

You want that Asian foodstuff

better go back to Man-hat [tan]

I got my pencil and paper, baby

but a list ain’t all we lack.

Takes more than hopin’ and wishin’

to end this here virus attack.

O.K., enough of this now. The blues ain’t nothin’ but COVID-19 on your mind.

Tonight’s dinner: stuffed green peppers, roasted brussel sprouts, and salad

Entertainment: Two episodes of Austrialian journalism-politico thriller, Secret City, plus one episode of Twilight Zone.

Posted on

A Journal of the Plague Year 2020–chapter 65

A roadside sculpture in Springs, N.Y.

Wednesday, May 13

You see it at every time of year on the East End, particularly in our East Hampton neighborhood of Springs: ART.

Situated in driveways or front yards, there are a lot of metal sculptures, often painted a first responder orange or some other eye-catching hue. There are beach-ball size metal spheres, metal-beam uprights, even an abstract cut-out that in some Marcel Duchampesque world is said to resemble a deer. There are frequent shows of local artists’ work at the former schoolhouse that’s now an exhibition and lecture space known as Ashawagh Hall.

This past weekend, 52 artists from Hampton Bays to Montauk staged an exhibition on their porches and lawns, “Drive-by-Art (Public Art in This Moment of Social Distancing).” One artist’s contribution consisted of steel-wool octopuses positioned in her hedgerow. Another offered canvas-wrapped posts set six feet apart along her lawn. Art-world shock jock and Whitney museum fave Eric Fischl provided life-size sculptures of dancing nymphs at his Sag Harbor home. All of the works were meant to be admired by art lovers who were socially distanced from each other inside their vehicles.

Ever since the late 19th century, artists have been coming out to the East End, drawn by the light, the isolation, and the presence of wealthy buyers. Portraitist and landscape painter William Merritt Chase followed his rich friends out in the 1890s, setting up a studio and a school near Southampton. Belmonts, Carnegies, Astors, and Vanderbilts helped defray his costs.

The successful impressionist painter Childe Hassam purchased an East Hampton house in 1919, joined the Maidstone Club, and tooled about in a chauffeur-driven limo.

More famous today are the abstract expressionists who began arriving some twenty-five years later. These folks experienced the same lures as previous artists—plus that of the then-cheap real estate. Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner lived in Springs from 1945 until Pollock died drunk in a car crash along Fireplace Road in 1956. Pollock created his anarchic, improvisational drip paintings both on a concrete slab in the yard behind the couple’s farmhouse and also in a nearby barn. Today, the house is the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, administered by Stony Brook University. You can visit the place, wander through the small cottage, and even enter the barn, where the floor is considered such a work of art that visitors must don protective rubber shoes.

Krasner produced widely varying work—including abstract art, collage, and postmodern pieces—into the 1970s. She died in 1984 at age 75.

Willem de Kooning also lived in Springs, not far from Pollock/Krasner starting in 1961. He, too, is remembered as an abstract expressionist, but on the East End, he developed a new style, erotic and lyrical. He built a large, industrial-style studio across from the Green River Cemetery. And his work was the subject of a series of major shows in New York and Europe.

 By the late 1980s, De Kooning was still painting but suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s disease. He died in 1997, at 92 years of age.

Other creative people also lived nearby in Springs, including New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling and his wife, novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning short story writer Jean Stafford. The very funny Liebling is one of my favorite writers, and his New Yorker “press clips” columns offer an indelible look at 20th century American journalism.

Enough with the local history. 

I’ve fallen into this subject as, like everyone else, I have so little to do these days. You wake up, read the paper, have a small lunch, take a walk, and then it’s time to make dinner and watch videos. The weeks scamper by—we’ve been out here for almost ten weeks now and it’s hard to ever imagine a return to NYC.

Dinner: leftover lentil soup, and salad.

Entertainment: More episodes of Bordertown.

Posted on

A Journal of the Plague Year 2020–chapter 64

Sag Harbor whaler and ferryman Pyrrhus Concer.

Tuesday, May 12

Reading the obits for Little Richard makes me reflect on Trump, believe it or not. Like Mr. MAGA, Little Richard was full of braggadocio: He apparently once told talk-show host Arsenio Hall “I’m not conceited, I’m convinced!” It was far from the only sort of over-the-top behavior for Richard Wayne Penniman, but it’s a blustering style that has appeared again and again among show-biz figures, from wrestler Gorgeous George to Muhammad Ali and on to our orange-topped leader. 

Yes, Trump is forever proclaiming that he’s the greatest, the smartest, the whatever-est. But very quickly, you sense the insecurity behind the bragging—he doesn’t buy it himself. That’s why Trump has to surround himself with yes-men and cannot abide the presence of any real expertise: Someone like Fauci immediately demonstrates what true knowledge and insight are about, exposing Trump to the bright light that kills not only coronaviruses but also phonies.

Back to history: As for East Hampton’s African Americans, until recent times there were only a few, beginning in the late 17th century. A 1687 census lists 25 “slaves” and says that just under 5% of the town’s population was African American. One landowner’s will lists two slaves—valued at £58 and mentioned just after the listing of his 100 sheep, which were valued at £25. Historian T.H. Breen speculates that the blacks were domestic servants, possibly brought here from New York City.

Other records suggest that there was an African-American community on the north side of East Hampton. But I haven’t been able to find out much about that.

There were black whalers living in Sag Harbor, including Pyrrhus Concer, who was born in 1814, worked on whale boats, and later ran a ferry on Lake Agawam. Nearby Shelter Island was largely occupied by the 8,000-acre Sylvester Manor, which up until 1820 was one of the largest slaveholding sites on Long Island.  There’s also a slave burying ground there that includes over 200 unmarked graves.

And in the 20th century, there have been several predominantly black neighborhoods in Sag Harbor. Such neighborhoods as Azurest, Ninevah Beach, and Sag Harbor Hills were largely populated by well-to-do African Americans, including Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, Duke Ellington, and more recently, restaurateur B. Smith.

Other Southampton sites notable in African-American history include the St. David’s AME Zion church and the fledgling Southampton African-American history museum. The museum is the former Randy’s Barbershop located on North Sea Road, which for many years served as an African American gathering place.

Tonight’s dinner: lentil soup with frankfurters and a green salad.

Entertainment: episodes of the Finnish policier Bordertown and one of The Twilight Zone.

Posted on

A Journal of the Plague Year 2020–chapter 63

Stephen Taukus “Talkhouse” Pharaoh

Monday, May 11

The most visible minority presence in the Hamptons nowadays is Latino. But of course, it wasn’t always that way.

Latin American immigrants have been coming to the Hamptons for decades, drawn here by the promise of construction and other work. Decades back, Colombians, Costa Ricans, and Mexicans were the first Latinos to arrive, followed by Ecuadorians, Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Venezuelans, and others.

 I’m quite aware of the Ecuadorian presence, as a result of conversations with construction workers and waiters, and thanks to the presence on East Hampton’s North Main Street of a bodega called Mitad del Mundo—named after a place in Ecuador that’s near to the equator.

Some 15% to 20% of East Hampton’s current population is Latin, along with over 25% of the school population. Between 1980 and 2000, according to the U.S. Census, the Latino population grew tenfold, to 2900. Such figures, of course, are likely a huge underestimate.

In earlier decades, the larger minority groups were Native American and African American.

As I described in an earlier post, it was the Montaukett Indians who sold the East Hampton land to whites in the 17th century. For many years thereafter, that Native American group kept to itself, concentrated in the Montauk area. The white settlers in East Hampton stuck to farming and occasionally harvesting a “drift whale,” a leviathan who’d somehow beached itself. By law, householders were required to turn out and help with the smelly, disgusting labor of hacking up a dead whale, whose blubber could be turned into valuable lamp oil.

This whale fat gradually became an important source of income for the farmers. And by 1670, they realized that they didn’t just have to depend upon fate to send a whale their way—they could go out to sea and kill the right whales that ventured near to the East Hampton coastline.

The East Hamptonites began forming private whale companies, outfitted with sturdy boats, harpoons, oars, a drogue (or sea anchor that got affixed to a wounded whale), and huge kettles for cooking down blubber. Each boat required a crew of six strong men.

Re-enter the Montaukett Indians. In a move that would be the envy of many gig-economy workers today, the Indians began negotiating labor contracts with the East Hampton whites. These contracts generally committed individual Montauketts (who made their marks on the dotted line) to a season of whale hunting, in exchange for which the Natives would get half of the harvested whale meat.

Why did the Montauketts do it? There’s evidence that they were gradually drawn into a kind of debt peonage, promising to labor until they’d paid off what they owed. Like the whites, the Indians had come to appreciate the finer things in the way of European-made goods that could be obtained for hard cash.

This sort of whaling seems to have come to an end after about sixty years, circa 1730. There had been massive overfishing of the shallow-water whale population, and after the mid-1700s, all that remained was deep-water whaling, as was conducted out of Sag Harbor and Nantucket. Along with the waning of East Hampton whaling came that of the Montauk tribe. By the 1770s, there were only thirty Indian families remaining, the others having wasted away due to poverty and white-men’s disease. (Most of the above information is drawn from T. H. Breen’s Imagining the Past: East Hampton Histories.)

One exception: Stephen Taukus “Talkhouse” Pharaoh, a late 19th century survivor. Talkhouse, a prodigious walker, claimed a variety of exploits, including prospecting for gold in the California gold rush, serving in the Union army, winning a walking race from Boston to Chicago, and participating in P. T. Barnum’s circus. His name lives on thanks to local monuments and to the Amagansett rock ’n’ roll club named for him.

Tonight’s dinner: grilled pork chops, baked potatoes, and brussel sprouts.

Entertainment: back to Occupied, the Norwegian futuristic thriller that contemplates a Russian power grab of Norway’s North Sea oil. 

Posted on

A Journal of the Plague Year 2020–chapter 62

Hotel-ready: An ultraviolet virus-killing wand.

Saturday, May 9

Unemployment is at scary levels, it seems. But, hey, that’s not so bad for everyone.

If actual U.S. unemployment is around 20%, as some at the Labor Department admit, employers will have no problem filling low-wage jobs. Those recently enacted laws mandating a $15 minimum wage? Fuggetaboutit. They’ll be undercut by the underground-economy reality.

And consider the other evils of prosperity. When demand is high for goods and services, suppliers can more easily raise prices—and that can mean inflation across the economy. When raw materials are eagerly dug and mined, when the seas are plundered of fish, and when forests and jungles are stripped of their trees and wildlife, the planet comes under ever greater pressure. In fat times, stores are crowded, highways are crammed with traffic, and the skies are darkened with pollution. Recession can be a cure for all such woes.

But will some of today’s unemployment be permanent? Already a lot of people had lost permanent jobs and had only marginal slots within the so-called “gig economy,” where you make do with one small project after another. I know many such people—and I myself have taken on several such projects in the past 10 years. Gig posts can be eliminated at the drop of the hat.

On top of all this, technological job displacement is on the rise. One example: A number of sources, including the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation at the University of Minnesota, point toward job loss resulting from only one labor-saving innovation, driverless vehicles. In a majority of U.S. states, the most common job is truck driving.

Take those jobs away, and the argument for a guaranteed annual income becomes absolutely compelling. Come back, Andrew Yang!

No matter what anyone says, East End guesthouses are anticipating the summer season. The East Hampton Star has interviewed management at Baker House 1650 and other swank hostelries and found them ready to reopen. “The new must-have amenities will include face masks made from luxurious fabric, chic dispensers for hand sanitizer, body temperature scanners, aesthetically pleasing dividers to ensure people maintain six feet of social distance, and other items that allow people to feel safe and pampered,” says The Star. 

Common spaces will be cleaned on an hourly basis, and rooms will get zapped with an ultraviolet light-sanitizing wand. Maybe we could stick that down your throat while we’re at it, eh Mr. President? Shine a light inside the body?

Earlier I ventured out to nearby Maidstone Market, hoping to make up a bit for the shortfall in Peapod’s delivery. Until very recently, you’d go to a window at Maidstone Market and just tell a staffer what you wanted. But suddenly, they’re allowing patrons to come inside the store so long as you’re wearing a face mask. Boy, they had lots of stuff—and boy do you pay for it. I got some cornbread mix, a dozen eggs, and two rolls of antacid—for a measly $11.85. Them that’s got shall get, and them that’s not shall lose.

Tonight’s dinner: Ziti with roasted red pepper, goat cheese, and toasted walnuts, plus a green salad with avocado. 

Tonight’s entertainment: the final episodes of The Valhalla Murders. 

Posted on

A Journal of the Plague Year 2020–chapter 61

The barn (c., 1721) at East Hampton’s Mulford Farm.

Friday, May 8

Did yesterday’s post focus too heavily on the designer-label shops of East Hampton, and thereby neglect the town’s very lengthy and complex past?

The area that now composes the town dates back to 1648, when it was purchased by two Connecticut governors. In exchange for the land, they gave the Montauk Indians an assortment of goods such as coats, hatchets, and knives. The New England men, in turn, resold the area for £30 to a group they called “the Inhabitants of East Hampton.” The new settlers came here by way of New England, looking for less-settled territory where they could raise crops and pasture their farm animals. Each original inhabitant got a house lot of several acres in the center of East Hampton, plus rights to use of the common fields.

Over the decades to come, some settlers would turn to whaling and fishing. Others engaged in commerce, trading the local produce and fish for goods made elsewhere.

By the second half of the 19th century, there were new intruders: members of the leisure class, traveling out to the East End via the Long Island Railroad. The exclusive Maidstone Club was founded in 1894, and its challenging golf course was redesigned in the 1920s to occupy 130 acres facing the Atlantic coast. By 1929, when Jacqueline Bouvier was born, there was a well established enclave of the wealthy in the Hamptons. And after World War II, as vacations and leisure activity became more possible for the middle and working classes, even more visitors came out to the area, bringing with them the development that has in recent decades become rampant.

Several groups have acted as an obstacle to this development: traditionalists, environmentalists, the local fishermen who are generally called Baymen, and the organization called the Ladies Village Improvement Society, formed in 1895 to ensure that the community’s “storied charms will not be disturbed by the pressures of contemporary growth and development.” The more commercial enterprises that have sought to win a foothold here in recent decades, ranging from fast-food outlets to the bookstore chain Barnes & Noble, have found their paths blocked. But legions of McMansions continue to advance across the former marshes and potato fields.

Much of this information comes from a 1990 book by Northwestern University historian T.H. Breen, Imagining the Past: East Hampton Histories. I will include more detail on the town’s history in future posts .

Today’s weather has been cloudy and, by the end of the day, rainy.

Tonight’s dinner: Avgolemono soup and a lettuce, avocado, and tomato salad.

Tonight’s entertainment: more episodes of The Valhalla Murders.

Posted on

A Journal of the Plague Year 2020–chapter 60

Along East Hampton’s Main Street.

Thursday, May 7

I am back at BusinessWeek, working on the copydesk. I have at least three stories to turn around, some handed down to me by one slacker colleague who has finagled some way of leaving early. I am laboring at a very antique, manual machine, which seems unlikely to have any way of being part of the magazine’s electronic network. When I try to utilize the system’s query mechanism, which is supposed to let you track a story’s progress from writer to various editors, of course that doesn’t work. Another grueling shift looms.

Time to cast aside such sweaty dreams and wake up!

Just what will the Hamptons’ economy be like once things reopen? Typically, it is a very peculiar scene: On East Hampton’s main street, beginning at the Hampton Jitney stop and running up to Newtown Lane, real estate offices and designer-label stores predominate, an ever-changing cast of toffee-nosed boulevardiers.

Whether Polo Ralph Lauren or Eileen Fisher, these are not so much like genuine stores as they are luxe advertisements—the kind you see on the opening pages of Vogue or Vanity Fair. Their presence allows the companies to post “Paris * New York * East Hampton” on their plus-size shopping bags. Will such outfits return—or will many of the storefronts be vacant? 

Is there any chance that genuinely useful stores will appear instead? The pandemic and economic collapse has meant, at least theoretically, the possibility of remaking the local scene. Why not an interesting art gallery or an affordable, ethnic eatery? Most of the restaurants out here are just variations on one theme: mid- to high-priced Italian cuisine, grilled branzino or braised veal osso buco. What about some lower-priced Asian fusion or Vietnamese grub? What about a store selling clothing that working people might actually wear? Or a performance space for edgy theater or dance? Maybe some of these storefronts should revert to residences, as many of them once likely were.

Many of the local full-time residents probably like things as they are. They’ve come to depend on the seasonal tourist trade and business from the wealthy who own vacation homes here. If not for the resort-town economy, East Hampton would probably resemble seedier and less-developed North Fork burgs such as Mattituck or Flanders. Moreover, the true locals have their own mostly separate institutions, including the volunteer fire department, the VFW post, the community Presbyterian church, and less-posh restaurants such as Springs Tavern.

It’s a beautiful if still cool, sunny day. As I have said Peapod is due to make an afternoon delivery—they typically send a text message a short while before they expect to arrive. Beforehand, we’ll have to set up a socially distanced table outside for them to leave stuff on, then make a space to put groceries on inside the house. Anything that doesn’t need refrigeration will be left unhandled in its own quarantine for three days.

And sure enough, the Peapod delivery arrived around 3:50 p.m. We got many of the things we ordered, but 18 were missing, including scallions, cabbage, boy choy, walnuts, cucumbers, napkins, and Pepcid.

Dinner: leftover black beans and rice, Asian green beans, green salad

Entertainment: Two episodes of The Valhalla Murders.

Posted on

A Journal of the Plague Year 2020–chapter 59

Lazybones.

Wednesday, May 6

I slept until almost 9 a.m. this morning. I suspect a lot of people are sleeping more these days. Maybe I was tired after my big adventure yesterday, going to the dump and coffee store. Today, we can spend time worrying about tomorrow’s grocery delivery—will it be raining when they come, will we get the stuff we want or will lots be “out of stock”? Emily is able to look at our order online and she says that, so far, it looks like we’ll be getting virtually everything but ramen, Lipton soup, and whole wheat flour.

She has had a persistent cough for what seems like more than a year. Two doctors have told her that they have checked everything else, so the cough must be caused by acid reflux. And indeed, I recently discovered an old cache of Tums and they do seem to help. A few nights back she took one after dinner and she reported not only did she sleep better but she felt generally better the day after.

So another item in the Peapod order is famotidine, a.k.a. Pepcid, which one of her specialists recommended.

Right now Emily is listening to a legal podcast on the topic of employment rights during the epidemic. One talker has a particularly harsh and nasal voice, which drives me to go for a walk outside despite the imperfect weather. As is often the case hereabouts, it is cloudy and the air is cool and damp.

Before I go, a young doe wanders into our yard and peers in through the kitchen window. Everything indicates that deers’ eyesight is bad, and though I attempt to gesture her away, she pays no attention until I open and slam the side door, at which point she gallops away.

Back from an unremarkable sortie, I read a quote from the Times that “older adults as a group have a positivity bias,” or tendency to see the good side of situations, according to Gary M. Kennedy, director of geriatric psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center and professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “Their pessimism and anxiety tend to abate with age. They’re no longer striving for material achievements, so what matters to them now is what’s emotionally satisfying. They’re more likely to say, I’ve been through this before.”

But what could be the good side of the pandemic? The Times also has an article asserting that we’ll all just get used to a situation in which one or two thousand people die of coronavirus every day. It’ll be an adjustment somewhat akin to the way in which we’ve simply accepted a very high level of gun deaths and mass shootings as normal.

The article contains this shocker: “An internal document based on modeling by the Federal Emergency Management Agency obtained by The Times projects that the daily death toll will reach about 3,000 on June 1, a 70% increase from the May 1 number of about 1,750.”

Both the Town of East Hampton and East Hampton Village are now moving toward limiting attendance on local beaches.

I already foresee guys with Bushmasters and MAGA hats gathering en masse to protest this grotesque intrusion on their beachgoing liberties.

Dinner: Black beans and rice, with a lettuce and celery salad.

Entertainment: Two episodes of the Icelandic policier The Valhalla Murders.

Posted on

A Journal of the Plague Year 2020–chapter 58

Signs of the times at the East Hampton Recyling Center.

Tuesday, May 5

Maybe I’ll start carving slashes in the wall to mark off the days….

You remember those movies. Humphrey Bogart or some such hardboiled type is thrown into the clink—likely on trumped up charges. In his loneliness, he makes a pet of a cockroach. Then, using a purloined spoon, each day he hews marks on the wall so he won’t lose track of how long he’s been in confinement.

Not to overdramatize or anything.

But in our confinement, one does lose track of time, and the future stretches out dauntingly. News reports say that even the mentally challenged Trump administration admits that daily fatalities may double in the next few weeks. Even the most optimistic of realists say they imagine the quarantine stretching out to the end of June. Few of my contacts would be surprised if it lasted longer, and Emily’s college-student niece, soon to be a senior, is wondering if her actual classes will ever resume. His other daughter, currently living in Colorado, has applied for a job in their home state of Massachusetts supervising “contact tracing.” I can’t imagine just what skills are needed for such a post.

I’m putting this quote from the Times here so I don’t lose track of it: “Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, published an analysis last week describing three possible pandemic wave scenarios through the end of 2021: a series of repetitive smaller waves that gradually diminish over time; a sharp rise in cases in the fall and one or more subsequent smaller waves; and a ‘slow burn’ of continuing transmission, without a clear wave pattern.”

Last night’s telephone conversation with Emily’s brother underscored just how lucky we—and other retirees—are. We have health care, thanks to Medicare and Medicare supplements. With a little bit of stress on our memories, we can arrange for all our bills to be paid. So our only hardships are frivolous—getting groceries and accepting lengthy hair that makes one appear to be in need of love beads and bell-bottom pants. Hey, let’s listen to the White Album again!

Soon, I will venture out, accoutered in my disposable, made-in-China face mask. Of the three masks Emily ordered from Etsy, only one has arrived—and given its gaudy pattern, I’m not sure I want to be seen wearing it.

Outdoors, there’s that irony that I’m getting a bit used to: Electric green trees and flowering magenta shrubs are detonating with vigorous health, amid the possible decline and fall of the human race. There are few cars on the road, although the street-repair crews and utilities linemen have been very beaverish lately, forcing drivers into patterns of intermittent yielding and lane-weaving. The recycling center is not crowded, and everyone present maintains a proper social distance, as they are instructed to do by prominent signs.

At the small shopping area called Amagansett Square, there are also plenty of signs about precautions to be taken during the pandemic. The fancy cheese store turns out to be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. The restaurant called Meeting House is likewise clearly closed, but exotic pop music resounds from an outdoor speaker. Coffee seller Jack’s, however, is busy attending to a dozen customers. One of the workers there says the store has been “crazy busy,” she doesn’t know why. Most everything else in Amagansett, except for the liquor store, is closed. Essential supplies, coffee and liquor.

Two weeks from now, we’re supposed to start getting warm weather.

I can recall some depressing summers from the past. Generally, I think I felt that way when the near future was very unknown. Inevitably, the coming summer will also be suffused in mystery about the shape of things to come.

Dinner: canned Progresso split pea soup, corn muffins, baked potatoes, and green salad.

Entertainment: I’m still into the Norwegian thriller Occupied, but its suspense doesn’t compare with the suspense we experience on a daily basis.