Imagine me driving Ena to Urgent Care* at 1:45 this afternoon while I’m leading her through a guided meditation to get her to relax. Just so.

I’m pulling out onto 125th Street (wide and busy main arterial) saying to Ena, “Close your eyes and sit back. Let the sounds around you fill you”. Which are, as far as I can tell, the sounds of a turn signal signaling my right turn and a bunch of cars that I’m waiting for.

“Feel your weight press into the seat. Feel your feet on the floor. Feel your hands at your side” he said while turning left onto the I5 ramp. “You have a Yield Sign!” he said at the red Mazda 6 barreling through a right hand turn in front of him. “Take a deep breath in… and out and start to scan your body… starting at your head… breathing and scanning with kindness and compassion… if you come to spot of tightness…. breath into the tightness and release…” he said, in a much softer and compassionate voice than he used for the Mazda, while accelerating into 70 MPH traffic on I5 South.

“Scan down from the top of your head to your neck… and shoulders…” he said changing lanes to get out from behind a slow moving truck full of landscaping equipment. “Follow the body down your left arm… and back up… while taking deep slow breaths… each breath bringing relaxation and peace….” he said and he moved back over to get out of traffic heading for the 520 bridge.

Thus, I ended up leading a guided meditation on I5** as I was driving Ena to Urgent Care. At the end of the meditation I asked her, “How do you feel? Better?”

‘Yes’, she said.

“Still want to go to Urgent Care?”

‘We can turn around… No. Oh. I don’t know!” she said with the slight rise of frantic OMG in her voice.

“Close your eyes and sit back.” He said as he continued on to Urgent Care.

*Ena has had a cluster of angina attacks over the past couple of days. They all respond to her drugs and none last longer than a couple of minutes. She decided to write to our doctor (Dr. Thomas) and tell her about the cluster but also tell her that she is still trying to get follow-up tests scheduled.

The doctor covering for Dr. Thomas replied that she should go to Urgent Care. Ena called the doctor on-call and talked with him. He said, “this doesn’t look like a cardiac issue to him” but that she should go to Urgent Care based on how she was feeling which was anxious and short of breath which was probably due to being stressed and anxious.

We both mostly expect everything to be “normal” again in the test they run at Urgent Care. As of this draft the blood tests and EKG have come back normal. The Urgent Care doctor said that this is a cardiac issue and has re-referred Ena to Cardiology. He also said that her course of treatment is the standard. She has a new drug so hopefully that will help.

** p.s. I have noticed a lot more traffic out and about. We are still supposed to be staying at home unless travel is absolutely necessary. The American Attention Span is about two weeks long. “AAHHH! CORONAVIRUS! AAAHHH! We are going to DIE! AAAAHHH! We need hotdogs. Guess I’ll run to the store.

Ena News: She can transition off the crutches over the next couple of days. Yay! I will be so glad when she is off crutches. I have I mentioned that I’m really tired of the sound of crutches – the creaky-Kachonk of crutches? The sound of crutches falling over? The sound of crutches falling over in the middle of the night?

So, “Yay” to no more crutches!

She also heard back from the cardiologist. Her CT scan with contrast looked perfectly normal. Her surgeon also looked at it and said, “You look like a healthy adult who never smoked. I don’t see anything wrong.” The cardiologist said that she does not have any blocked arteries and that her chest pain is not a heart attack. She is doing the correct things of lowering her cholesterol and blood pressure. Check back in a year. Yay? I mean “Yay!” I guess in that she doesn’t have any blocked arteries and she isn’t having heart attacks but it would be nice to have a diagnosis of what is going on.

So that is where we are at on the Ena health care front.

She is my beloved. We started dating 23 years ago this coming Summer. Kind of amazing. This photo is from about then. We smiled like goofy school kids at each other all the time.And this one is from February of this year in The Before. We still smile at each other like goofy school kids.

I have been feeling the “presence”* of my mother these past few days or weeks. Maybe it is all the cooking, cleaning and running the house. Mom believed that all of us should know how to keep house: boys and girls. I’m really grateful for what she taught me. They are prime skills at this time.

I was mixing a large bowl of chicken salad, and I was using a serving spoon (a small one that came with our silverware). I could hear Mom say, “Don’t use a small spoon for a large bowl. Get a spoon big enough to do the job.”

I said, out loud I must add, “I know Mom. I know.”

Ena said, “What?” rightfully confused by my sudden utterance and calling her Mom.

I told her that I was talking to my Mom saying to get a big spoon instead of a small spoon.

I also felt her when I was mopping the kitchen floor. I was rinsing it off when I heard her tell me, “You need to rinse the cleaner off. The cleaner is designed to attract dirt. Leave it on the floor and you’ll just attract the dirt.”

This are strange times, when people are falling back on old-school skills. People are buying chickens and planting gardens. It feels like the 40s (minus the War), sort of. People looking to be resourceful, minimize shopping, not go out. Cooking at home. Growing their own food. Taking care of their house and loved ones.

We are lucky that we have the tech to help us live through this with some comfort. I can order groceries to be delivered in a variety of ways. We can see the latest movies on-line and streaming if we want to pay for it. So, unlike the 40s, we have tech to help us through, but we don’t have the social gatherings that came with the war.

When we lived in Wisconsin, we went down to New Glarus – a little town that calls itself “Little Switzerland”. There is an old bar called Puempel’s Olde Tavern. It was established in 1893. There is a tiny dance floor in the back of this shotgun tavern. [That is, long and narrow not that everyone is carrying shotguns. That you have explain this says something about these times. – Editor]

On the dance floor, there were elderly couples, mostly, dancing waltzes and simple swing, to old songs like The Tennessee Waltz played by a live three-piece band. Elderly women sat along the wall waiting for an invite to dance. I had the sense that these people were here in 1943 – the men young and handsome in their uniforms – the women waiting and worried.

These times, there is something that brings us back to the core of living. To those old voices speaking of cooking and cleaning and running house. Of growing food and checking on neighbors. Fast Fashion seems ludicrous (more so) at these times. Sewing masks and making art and bread have come to the fore. And, I guess, so has my mother’s voice – teaching the arts and crafts of running a home.

* I do not think her ghost or spirit is in the house. This is just the lessons and voice of my mother coming back across the ages.

So that was the 10th week of working from home. Ena is still on crutches and we still don’t have an answer yet to her cardiac issues. Seattle is just starting to open back up a little bit as long as you are wearing a mask and you stay 6′ feet apart unless you are in a restaurant or you are a nutter carrying an AK knockoff in front of the Capital Building. Then you can do what ever you want because Freedom!

Me. I’m grumpy. I’m tired of running and walking in the neighborhood. I’m psychologically tired of the “constant presence of it all” and the “constant vigilance” I have to practice. Also, my hands are sore from washing and disinfecting and sanitizing.

And it’s raining.

So here is this: the last photo from The Before:

Look at all those people walking around looking at arts and crafts at the Pacific Northwest Garden Show. This was the first time we had even been to this show. We thought it would be about plants and garden design. It was mostly about a craft fair, and things you could buy on the Home Shopping Chanel (mattresses that adjust up and down in his and her styles), some people who supply stuff like stone, and gates, and skylights. There were a few display gardens inside under really strange lighting.

But this was The Before. When we took a bus downtown to go out to lunch and to a garden show and to walk through the Sculpture Garden before catching a Lyft home.

This was a world away in a time long forgotten (it seems). It is like an age of innocence. A period before when you happily climbed on the bus with a bunch of people in Mariners fan wear and others going to work on the weekend. When you looked forward to a kind of crowded restaurant full of fun people to watch. A time when you thought eating food with your hands in a crowded place was a kick not a dangerous fling with possible death.

I don’t think I was as grumpy then. I think these things are related.

I was chatting with a colleague asking him if he had any insights into two different strategic planning engagements that I’m being asked to help with. He said, “those are both from The Before. I’m not sure they make sense now. Where will the funding come from? Is this the most critical thing?”

That struck me – The Before. Will this be a point in time we talk about like 9/11? I remember flying before 9/11 – you could practically walk out to the gate 20 minutes before your flight. I remember just having plane tickets that were tickets. You could give them to someone else to use if you couldn’t use them.

Will we talk about The Before? No one wore masks on buses in The Before. In The Before, there was no single-payer health care really [This is aspirational – editor]. What is it we will carry forward into The After (I call it A.D. – After Donald)? Will we be proud of the adaptations and our responses or will they be ugly stains like the xenophobia and racism against Muslims that rose up from 9/11?

Will we say, “in The Before, people really didn’t get how important teachers and schools were that why there are all these new programs to help out K-12”. Will we point to new public science that is working on vaccines and disease tracking and drug discovery and say, “All of this was driven by the events of The Before”?

Will Higher Education embrace (truly and deeply) remote teaching and learning as well as on premise and learn to do it well? Will new tools appear to help build true engagement through a screen?

Let us hope that we look back at The Before with awe and think of all of the great things that came from it, not just the death and loss of incomes. Let us hope that this is a period of growth, not just survival.

P.S. The image above is from gabrielletreanor.com. I really don’t know anything about her other than I like the framework she put out.

I don’t know why but today I feel exhausted. Maybe it is the heat. This is the first hot weekend of the year. Both days in the 80s and I was busy outside most of the weekend. Maybe all the yard work and stuff caught up with me. Maybe it is the new dose of anti-anxiety meds. Maybe it is existential exhaustion from All Of It (™)

I had a nap but it was the kind where you don’t sleep well and you wake up more tired (or at least just as tired) as before you lay down to sleep. (Kim L – I had to Google this for the whole lay, lie, laid, lain thing – editor)

Maybe next week will be Ena’s last week on crutches. Let’s hope. Maybe she will get her CT scan and we will get a diagnosis for her chest pains. Let’s hope. Did I mention that we got a new hot water heater on Friday? Let’s hope it is the last of those kinds of house repairs for while. Let’s hope a nice evening and good night’s rest rejuvenates my energy cells. That’s kind of what I’m running on right now – fumes and hope.

I saw my toiletry bag hanging up in the bathroom and I thought, “I should put that away. I’m not going anywhere for a while”. That really struck me. I love travel and really enjoy the travel I do for work. I have a large national (international actually) network of friends and colleagues. I would travel about 4 to 6 times a year for work to conferences mostly. At each of these conferences, there is a circle of people who I have known for 10 to 20 years. Some, I don’t know so well that I would set up a call just to chat with them. Others, I really should reach out to see how they are doing.

This virtual world doesn’t allow for the random reconnections while walking the hallways of EDUCAUSE with 8,000 other people. It doesn’t let me look across the room at CSG and see Jenn and have a bit of an “Oh boy, Jenn is here” leap of heart or Ron, or Klara or any of a dozen other people.

Yes, there are people I’m really close to whom I am trying to stay in touch with. We have virtual dinners with friends and family (not as much as we should). There are others, the next circle out, with whom I chat or email. But there is a whole world of people, one-step further out, that I used to travel with and see at least once a year who now seem out of reach.

Seeing my toiletry bag and thinking that I might not need it for another 18 months really pressed upon the loss of that circle of connection in this pandemic. The loss of those crowds and travel, the random connections, the chance encounters with a charming and funny person in the airport, the people who are the next circle out of your acquaintances, with whom you always enjoyed your hallway catch-up, some of whom always took you back to another point in your life and great memories from then. This is what my toiletry bag makes me think about. This is the loss that strikes me.

Stay well. Reach out and chat someone. We’re all in this together.

I had such high hopes that at today’s visit, Ena’s doctor would tell her she could start to wean off the crutches… but, no. She will spend at least two more weeks on crutches. We are both quite tired of her being on crutches. We are also tired (maybe in the royal sense) of the intermittent, though brief, chest pains. I hope that her CT scan gets scheduled soon so we can get an answer or at least rule out … I don’t know what it will rule out but by damn let’s get it ruled the f*ck out.

We would both really like to move away from management to cure. From crutches to walking. [Did you know you can get sick of the sound of crutches – the kind of springy clunking ka-chunk ka-chunk? – editor]

You know, just get around to dealing with COVID-19 and working from home and only grocery shopping every 3 weeks (Thank You InstaCart! and WholeFoods delivery).

So, welcome to Week 9 of the Great Seattle Stay-Away 2020. Yep. That’s right. I’m starting my 9th week of working from home. I’m tired of the smell of bleach. I feel like I work at a YMCA pool in Summer except for the fun-in-the-sun part. Maybe I work in the basement of the YMCA where there is a pool that they use a LOT of chlorine in because there are a LOT of little kids coming and going and going in the pool.

Some pandemic experts are predicting that we have two more years – that’s 104 more weeks – before COVID-19 (20, and 21?) finally burns itself out because basically almost everyone has caught it. See my post about August 2022 being the next Summer of Normalcy.

A very minor annoyance here – the name COVID-19 isn’t all that great. It stands for Corona Virus Disease 2019. I’m not saying we should have named it Cough-Until-You-Are-Blue Virus. But, SARS-CoV-2 (SARS Corona Virus 2) does make a lot of sense. It is a corona virus that is very similar to the SARS virus. It is the sequel in some ways. The same but different. Like in James Bond when they changed from Sean Connery to Roger Moore (Yes, I know David Niven was the next Bond but who remembers that?!). But once again, I digress.

Are things settling into a new rhythm? Is this a new way of life that we can all live for 18 more months? My hair will be quite long if this goes on for 18 more months. And they better fix the toilet paper and flour supply chains if that is the case.

We are really lucky that we have a lovely house and a lovely yard. I go out and sit in the sun amongst the flowers in our “meadow”.* The “meadow” is lovely and full of spring sun and buzzing bugs and birdsong. I go out and breathe and sit and just be for a while. I just have some time when I’m not disinfecting something, or helping to manage Ena’s health, or working, or cooking, or cleaning, or worrying about all the things that could be added to that list above. Just sit and breathe. And listen to the life in the yard. And feel the sun on my back or face.

Breathe everyone. We may be in for the long haul. Stay well. Be healthy.

* Please note that our meadow is about 15 feet by 30 feet. It is not measured in acres or hectares (which I really don’t know the dimensions of other than it is a grouping of acres – maybe 20 acres? Dunno)