We had been Novids, Dolores and I, all this time or so we thought.
Until Christmas Eve. Doing a single load of dishes can knock me out such that I must retire to watch at least one half of a Big East basketball game. Last Friday I nearly passed out on the knives and forks and by the feast tested positive for Covid. Dolores tested positive a couple days later. Lucky for her that she no longer can smell me.
Good for me that I got my last vaccine shot a few weeks ago. Otherwise I would not be smoking and joking, color me blue. We’re okay.
It’s been a long time coming. In late 2019 I was so sick I actually went to the doctor. She advised I could have any number of upper respiratory viral nasties. I figured as much and coughed my way through it, ribs be damned. Saw my mother’s mother’s mother in beatific visions telling me I should not have stolen cigarettes from her when I was 12. I picked up my mat and walked after a couple weeks.
There were isolated reports of some strong SARS virus cropping up. I took off for New York City to help judge the Pulitzer Prizes. Folks were talking about it there. I flew to California and spoke at Berkeley in early 2020 just as everyone was getting edgy. I was in airports hither and yon transferring and waiting among the filthy masses breathing that Wuhan air at me without a mask.
By the time I lit in Storm Lake the Newell-Fonda girls won State again and even Big East basketball was cancelled. The lights went dark on Lake Avenue. The Storm Lake Times was wheezing and tumbling. A man glowing orange stood on the veranda of the White House wondering out loud if bleach might work. Is this real or are we all in one huge brain fog?
Meantime, son Joe the roving minstrel had been holed up in a New Orleans missionary shelter and knew he had to come home before he caught Calvinism. He hopped a Greyhound for Omaha. Can you imagine that ride? I met him at night in the yellow cast of the bus terminal parking lot as the riders streamed out from the men’s room. None of them had a mask. There’s Joe wearing a mask! He jumps in the car. We have the windows down and are freezing to death. I was blowing smoke everywhere trying to kill germs. “Girl With Far Away Eyes” by the Rolling Stones came on the radio, and Joe deprogrammed from fire and brimstone on a curve south of Odebolt.
Neither of us got sick.
Lovely daughter Clare was stuck in an apartment editing the Cedar Rapids Gazette from her laptop and got so lonely she came home.
We all got by thanks to miracles large and small.
You have to give Trump this: He got the vaccines rolling. He was not stupid enough to stand in Nancy Pelosi’s way. The whole damn thing was a modern marvel of science, logistics and human goodwill. It was done right here in the USA and rolled out despite Kim Reynolds and Ron DeSantis. God bless those public health nurses standing at the fairgrounds near the sheep barn giving me a shot through my rolled-down car window.
The virus in its cunning morphed, by my dim understanding, to give up some deadliness in order to evade vaccine outer defenses. Although Covid slipped through my border fence with a torch, it was not able to bury me because of the vaccine.
I sweated in bed at night like Rudy Giuliani. My brain was foggier than normal. The dishes piled up. Dolores managed to throw food together for us, bless her. It rained Christmas Day. Peach was going stir crazy and had to pee. Dolores and I were both in chills under blankets. Had to let her out, and Peach bolted off before we could cough boo. She came home wet with something dead. A gift.
Lord knows how we caught it. Kate Kealey’s nose was running like Niagra Falls before the holidays. Jon Robinson’s ear plugged up. So did mine. He felt fine a day later. I got worse. It wasn’t like we were slow-dancing together. You could hear Tom coughing in the back room, but he coughs year-round. Jen Olson was sick, but she has a son in grade school and we know how that goes. By the time you figure out you have Covid it’s already embedded everywhere. I might have caught it through an email from filmmaker Beth Levison in New York, who went down for the count a few days before me. It’s everywhere all at once. We shrug it off and get back to work after the so-called holidays as if it were the common cold. That is because of science and vaccines. Period. Full stop.
Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.
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Love his stuff! No brain fog here!