Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jules Rabin, who came to Vermont in 1968 to teach at Goddard College and 10 years later shifted to baking bread in a wood-fired oven. He lives in Plainfield.
We’re certifiably old, my wife and I: unbelievably, 80 and 95 years old. (While I still have my adolescence to complete.)
Just now, at the urging of our daughters, we’ve stepped into self-quarantine because of the higher vulnerability of old people like ourselves to the effects of the new plague that’s come down on us. We octo- and nonagenerians are the ones likeliest to die of it.
That act of self-quarantine meant, for me, right off, forgoing a trip yesterday to the supermarket to buy provisions for our annual New England boiled dinner; the same dish that celebrants of St. Patrick’s Day call “corned beef and cabbage,” and that I love and eat inordinately, once a year. I phoned my shopping list in to one of my daughters, as she had urged me to do: the corned beef itself, rutabaga, cabbage, etc., to which I would add more pot vegetables from our own store. With our sarcophagus-size freezer out back, and with bags of grain and flour crammed elsewhere in our big house (we were once bakers), I’ve reckoned that we could survive – eat sufficiently, that is – for six months to come, if we were cut off from the world. For that ordinary plenty, we’re probably the envy of billions of people on this planet (2 billon? 3 billion? 5 billion?) without being one bit what I would call ”fancy.” Country living, i.e. life on a dirt road miles from the nearest asphalt, brings certain advantages, along with its excess of isolation.
But I wander from my main point: that with this novel plague now squatting down on us, my wife and I have stepped uncertainly into a discipline of isolation from other physical human contact, with no end in sight. We won’t be absolute about our removal from the world: family will come over, once in a while, and a brief visit from a friend is already in prospect. In connection with that, he and I joked on the phone about the 6-foot separation that purists in this crisis intend to observe, and the new — absurd, is it? — custom of “elbow bumps.”
But how long, oh how long will we have to carry on in this way, and how will we endure it? We’ve known for 52 years the winter isolation that’s part of life in Vermont. I reassured one daughter, concerning the prospect of our voluntary quarantine, that we have a thousand unread books in our house, that will help us get through the long Isolation.
And we use the internet abundantly, and that will be another antidote to our isolation.
We don’t, though, go the way of television, because of the high wastage of good sense and good taste that‘s tied in with it. I have an Old Grump’s feeling that half a century of full-blast television succeeded in softening us up, the American populace, for the crude huckstering of Donald Trump.
Books – back to them — books alone – are too heavy a substance to carry us comfortably through The Siege. For my inadequate 95-year-old mind, at least. I find I have episodes of continuing to read down the page, and discovering that I’ve stopped attending to what I’m reading. Daydreaming is the default setting for people my age, after the brightest hours of the morning.
And as I make my way down this page right here, I continue to avoid the question that looms: How long will we, wife and I, be able to continue this pledge we made implicitly to our worried daughters, that we will live in self-imposed isolation from human contact, as much as we can bear to, until this sudden storm of ill health passes?
Two weeks?
Two months?
Hardly longer, I think.
So far so good, anyhow. We had our best meal of the month today, that New England boiled dinner, with ingredients proficiently delivered by the nearer daughter. It was a joy.
And in the slack hours of the evening I’ve been reading on the wing and for the second time in my life a light classic, Shaw’s “Pygmalion.” Which I find clamorously lightweight, should anybody inquire. Shaw speaks in a very loud voice. And with more certainty than anyone has a right to assert.
Like our president, in fact.
I’ll finish “Pygmalion” tonight and so end my second day of quarantine.
And after that: just onwards into the isolation.
