Life on the Lock Down

What it is like to be locked down? This not my first rodeo because in my youth lockdowns were more common.  I was quarantined when I had chicken pox and the mumps and the measles. None of those were controllable by vaccines in those days. Then there was scarlet fever. I had that and was in the house for six whole weeks. And neither can I forget those days in the fifties when noone knew where polio was coming from or how to stop it other than massive closing of places that attracted crowds like swimming pools and the Wisconsin State Fair. None of those quarantines really impacted the adults in my family. My dad continued going to work and my mother was a stay at home housewife at those times.

What I do remember of those days was that I didn't quite understand what was going on other than lots of kids were getting sick though most of us did survive. Yet with polio it was not quite that easy. Some people, children and even adults, were paralyzed  for life or died. One clear memory is that our family doctor was a woman and she contracted and died of polio. My mother must have known her quite well because she was heart broken as well as scared.

The many other short term disruptions of my life were often painful at the time but never did impact us in any way like the current Covid pandemic. I remember the record snow of 1947 in Milwaukee as more of an adventure. We crawled out of our houses and clambered around for a few days on the huge drifts and waited for the plows to free the #79  bus that had stalled on our street not too far from the house. I also remember the gas strike when we were living in London in the 1970's, That  created some weeks of difficult cooking issues, but our flat had electric heaters so we did not suffer too much from the chill.  Another London memory was the Chernobyl disaster in the 80's when I was running the ACM London program for the second time. That created a lot of fear and anxiety from parents of the students in the program as the media reported apparent clouds of nuclear waste headed across the north pole and down toward Scotland.  I suspect Monmouth College authorities were receiving the same kind of worrisome phone calls in the last few months  as I received in my office in London during that crisis.  One father, I remember clearly, ordered his daughter to return home immediately and I had to accompany her on the tube out to Heathrow to put her on an airplane and then call the distraught parent when that had been accomplished.  She sobbed all the way to the gate.

This one is of course different and far more long term.  We have been holed up in our little two bedroom apartment in Tucson for well over a month now. We see few people on our daily walks around our small gated community and have our groceries delivered by an outfit called insta-cart.  We pick up prescriptions at the Walgreens Drive Thru.  As members of the elder class we are more than conscious of the fact that if we contract this virus it could be more than a nasty came of the flu. 

So we shall continue our social distancing and wear our masks when we do go out and once again wait for better days.