Blog

I’m also being advised to write an uplifting and useful blog. Not sure I’m capable of being either uplifting or useful, but I can try.

For the first time in my life, I don’t have to pretend I care whether the Red Sox or the Patriots won their last game. There are no games. And I don’t have to choose which restaurant to go to, since we’re not going out.

For school vacation, we were planning to take the grandchildren to museums and arts and crafts fairs. Now they’re home before the end of term, but museums and fairs are closed. We have become the playground, the play structures, the museums. Turns out being entertaining is exhausting, but it does have the advantage of taking one’s mind off the gruesome details of daily life. It strikes me that some children will remember these months as the best of their lives.

Let’s talk about random acts of kindness, which abound, and about the ways we find to be social.

My mother, requesting that we do that “Look at one another” thing that my daughter installed on her computer. The “look at one another thing” is some sort of face time app that allows us to see one another.

Mobile residents in our condo, offering to do shopping runs, take out garbage, cook or even read over video applications to those who are shut in.

Yesterday the elevator in our building broke, and because elevator repairmen like repairmen everywhere are furloughed, there was no one who could fix our new, complex and technologically sophisticated elevator for several days. The fact that we have a number of disabled people in our building did not alter the circumstances, and we simply spent days praying that there would be no emergencies. But several able-bodied souls in the building volunteered to do the stairs for those who couldn’t.

This afternoon Mrs. G on the third floor decided that she needed to get out for a stroll, along with her walker. She would not submit to the humiliation of being carried down the stairs, but one of our number had an idea that she agreed would be more dignified. The person in question is a rock climber, and he has all kinds of ropes and cables in his spare bedroom. He suggested rigging a rope from Mrs. G’s porch down to the ground floor patio, and lowering her via a sophisticated mechanism down to the patio in gradual steps, using a zipline with a brake. As a member of the board, I objected strenuously. We have no liability insurance against zip-lining malfunctions, and I certainly didn’t want to start a trend. But these are strange times, and I was overruled. I had a choice—either oversee the whole thing and ensure that it was done as safely as possible or step away and allow the loonies to run the asylum.

It was a windy day, and we insisted that Mrs. G wear her parka. We strapped her into a sturdy office chair, which we rigged to the line anchored to the roof of her balcony. The other end we affixed to a telephone pole in the patio, attaching it to a point about five feet from the ground. She shouted “Geronimo!” as our mountain climbing resident released her into the air.

As we were stringing the rope and attaching it at both ends, none of us noticed—although I should have—that others in our building had similar ideas regarding groceries. Rather than carrying bags up the stairs, the teenage son of one of our residents decided to rig a pulley in the patio, and to use it to ferry bags of groceries up to the second, third and fourth floors.

When I finally noticed that there was a rope line running parallel to the one we were using to lower Mrs. G, I had a moment of déjà vu. I remembered being stuck on a ski slope with a college girlfriend, hanging on a broken chair lift 60 feet above the ground. The fact that it was fifty years ago didn’t make it any less terrifying. On that occasion, the steel cable supporting the chair lift we were on snapped, and we found ourselves lowered in slow motion to the ground. But we were in our early twenties, hale and hearty. This was a different situation. I reminded myself that we didn’t have a stuck chair lift, that the rope was functioning well, and that we were not 60 feet above the ground.

As Mrs. G reached the midpoint of her journey, the other line was also reaching its midpoint, going in the opposite direction, carrying several paper bags of groceries in a net. The young man managing the pulley was using all his energy to move the net up the line, but he had no experience in how the wind might interact with his muscular efforts. The two lines were only several feet apart, and the net swayed as it approached Mrs. G. She was also swaying, moaning and calling out that she was seasick and wanted off. As they came abreast of one another, the net actually somersaulted over the line, became tangled in Mrs. G’s zipline, freezing it in place, and spilling the bags of groceries into Mrs. G’s chair. Cartons of eggs opened and eggs shattered all around her. Cottage cheese coated her knees. Thankfully, all the bottles that fell—olive oil, orange juice, and milk—fell to the patio and shattered, missing Mrs. G completely.

We have a photo of Mrs. G. hanging above the patio, spreading peanut butter on a sliced baguette and eating it in the sunshine while her neighbors in the condo gathered at respectful distances from one another on the patio and ate crackers and cheese as they looked up and joked with her about her predicament. It will be a story she tells her friends for the rest of her life. And in this time of social distancing, it was some party.