Threading needles

Shows, weddings, marathons...and Covid

The 19 Voices for Choice show on the 30th and the trip to New York a few days later had been on the calendar for months. A dear friend from childhood was running the New York Marathon on the first weekend of November and I’d happily agreed to be her wing-woman for the event. So having a partner get Covid less than a week before the show and 10 days from departure threw a wrinkle into my plans.

Kwame and I had gone to a sweet arty wedding in late October, another event long on the calendar. The bride wore a green, strapless gown modeled after that worn by Kiera Knightly in Atonement; the father of the bride read a passage from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe. The mother-of-the-bride and another sister played cello and violin between the ceremony and the reception. There was hip Mexican food, fancy cookies instead of cake and varying degrees of masking. After being very cautious on our trip to the ceremony, we relaxed our guard around our immediate family pod. Of our group, the three people with the latest, covid bivalent booster, including me, stayed negative…the other were sick within two days.

It was strange to have Covid finally enter the house having watched the virus spiraling around the world and closer for the past few years. It had been out there for a long time. Sticking to mostly outdoor group activities — the music camps and camping trips and patio gigs — clearly was a lot safer. And after all this time, we felt protected. I was starting to feel a little sheepish as we wore our masks on the airplane and in the elevators and car-shares while most everyone else did not. The pull of the herd even when you know better.  Maybe we were moving out of the pandemic. But having Kwame and several of his family members get sick so quickly after one event was a big wake up call.

Kwame started isolating at the boat immediately after testing positive. His very slightly scratchy throat — we might not have tested ourselves if we didn’t get word that we’d been exposed — went to chills and headache between morning and evening. I spent much of the next day cooking up kitchari, texting with family and conferring with friends who've been through Covid already, then going to the grocery and ferrying food and supplies and newly-filled paxlovid prescriptions to the marina. Thank goodness for Espresso…and for glorious fall weather. I sat in the cockpit, handing boxes of ginger tea and coconut water, boxes of tissue and a food thermoses through the companionway.

We patched together a plan of boat and hotels to see if we could get him through the antivirals and me staying healthy to keep to my schedule. The next day I took off for the coast with my computer and books so he could have the house for a chunk of time. I continued to be asymptomatic and, much to my relief, tested negative again on Sunday morning before the show.

Safety-wise, I felt decent: we were outdoors on Casements' colorful back patio. I wore a mask for most of it and we wiped down shared mics between acts. I was struck, again, at how few people are masking these days; also, as I talked to people throughout the day, how many people have had Covid already. I remembered a long-ago headline: 'Everyone will get Covid eventually.' The pandemic seems to be going that way.

19 Voices for Choice featured a strikingly diverse group of women and nonbinary artists in a woman-owned bar. The bake sale was run by a local baker who rounded up other bakers the same way my co-conspirator in 19 Voices, Aireene Espiritu and I rounded up a bunch of songwriters and musicians. There was this moment where I looked out on the patio and people were grooving to an original song about not going back while another artist's daughter danced a jig, and everyone was digging into pieces of pie or cake or cookies. A couple dogs milled about wagging their tails, hoping for a crumb. A woman walked by wearing butterfly wings.

I was proud of all of us. Between the amazing music and @OvinLoven's off-the-hook bake sale we raised close to two thousand dollars to help those who need safe, fair reproductive health care. Inspired, and with some new lessons learned, Aireene and I plan to do more such events in 2023.

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The night before my flight to New York, I stayed overnight at hotel next to SFO. Kwame tested negative but we were still being careful: knowing friends had warned me about rebounds. Still I felt sad and regretful as soon as I walked into my room. The place was dated, a couple of notches down from the standards I've grown used to. I did a little yoga and paced the room before settling into finishing a small writing assignment— a simple task I had absolutely no focus for all week amid the shuffling around — and felt better. 

What the hotel did have was an airport shuttle, which ran on time and started off what would be an amazingly smooth day of travel. I was checking in at a JetBlue kiosk when Sally arrived; SFO felt orderly at that hour and we got to the gate as the plane was boarding. 

New York City! It's 'unseasonably warm' on the east coast this week. The sky was clear and the skyline gleamed as the plane came in for a landing. Metro Cards and subway dancers, Duane Reade stores on every other corner and turning leaves. I haven’t been to Manhattan in a more than a decade and it felt familiar and new and slightly-overstimulating as ever.

We got checked in, found healthy food at an upscale food court  and roamed around Midtown and Central Park as night fell. The race finish line was a blaze of lights and dozens of other runners were checking out the home stretch, taking photos and generally looking wowed.  The New York Marathon, I learned, is one of the six Star Marathons along with Berlin, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo and London. If a runner completes all six they get a medal…and some well-deserved bragging rights.

When I chatted with Kwame he said some of his symptoms were back. He was in bed with a cup of tea. Sounds like the Covid rebound has done its trick.

Meanwhile in Manhattan, very few people are wearing masks. We were in the minority again on the plane and pretty much most places we’ve gone so far.…