Category Archives: Covid19

Films with a Sense of Community in a Troubled Time

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As COVID 19 drives us further into isolation, I rely more and more on books, movies, and walks along the deserted trail that follows the canal. The walks clear my head and the books and movies transport me out of the house in a different way, so I can see how other storytellers are searching for meaning.  

Lately, I’ve seen two movie-series and a movie that you might like: Midnight Diner, a  Japanese anthology TV series directed by Joji Matsuoka, based on the graphic novels of Yaro Abe; The Queen’s Gambit, a U.S. miniseries based on a novel by “Walt” Stone Tevis and directed by Scott Frank; and The Life Ahead, from a novel written by Romain Gary and made into an Italian film directed by Edoardo Ponti, son of Sophia Loren, who still powerful at 86 shares the lead with Ibrahima Gueye, a very talented young actor.  

I think of these films specifically because all of them have themes of love manifested in camaraderie, community in its truest sense, and resilience in the face of hardships, and I’ve been hankering for a good shot of these things lately.  The Queen’s Gambit and The Life Ahead are hard in parts to watch, but working toward love is never easy, and all of these films pay back.

Shut in in Tel Aviv Exercise/Snack

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Another exercise session with Lucy Wyndham Read. She has dozens of exercise tapes on YouTube. The tapes range from 3 minutes up to at least 35 minutes, require no weights, and work every part of the body. You can tone, lose inches, pump up your metabolism, firm your breasts, slim your legs, melt the fat off your back, get rid of muffin tops, tighten your bat wings, drop a dress size, sculpt your tushy….. whatever you want.  

Wyndham Read is not the only one who can do all this; there are dozens of instructors with videos on YouTube, good videos that can give a person a thorough workout with or without weights. And all for free.

Many of the instructors work Tabata style:  high-intensity interval training that consists of 8 sets of fast-paced exercises with a ten-second rest between sets, or some variation of this. The name Tabata comes from Dr. Izumi Tabata, a physician and researcher, who around 1996 was hired by coach of the Japanese speed-skating team to examine their training program, which consisted of short, rapid bursts of efforts and short rest periods. Dr. Tabata analyzed the program and found it to be advantageous for both aerobic and anaerobic systems plus it took a lot less time than moderate anaerobic exercise. How could Americans not love it:  fast, effective, and scientifically developed?

In my own experience, it’s good to warm up before these exercises, but then, snip snap snout, —you’re sweating, toned, and you’ve done your heart a favor. 

Another top exercise is walking. Here, we’ve had a 100-meter limit, that just recently was lengthened to 500 meters. Either way, if you can get in the right frame of mind, you can take 100 meters in each of the 4 directions, and you’ve already done 400 meters, do that 4 X and it’s a little over a European mile. It’s a good way to know the neighborhood if you are a city dweller. If you live in the country you’re fortunate and can go as far in any direction you’d like. 

The walking and the Tabata make a perfect combination (with the walking first), and you may end up being in better shape after isolation is over, than you were when it started. 

For snacks, we’ve stocked up on rye and rick crackers, tangerines, strawberries, apples….and, maybe a few cantucci to have with tea.  Tea! It’s important to hydrate and I’m drinking lots of tea.  Here’s a recipe that I learned when I inadvertently ordered it at The Little Prince Bookstore on King George Street here in TLV:  

Pour boiling water over: honey to taste, 1 slice fresh ginger, 1cinnamon stick, fresh lemon juice, 1 tea bag green tea. Steep.

Another journey of the divided heart starts tonight when we leave Israel for the United States and head into yet another, stricter, quarantine. As my life here in Israel seems so normal to me now, I think when I return to the U.S. I will find a different country.

Shut in in Tel Aviv Work

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For a writer, it seems isolation/quarantine should be an ideal situation to write for hours every day, day in day out. Stores, parks, gyms, theaters are all closed; there’s no place to go, and the computer is ready and waiting. 

Then why, as the weeks have passed, do I have such a hard time sitting at the computer?  Why have I begun to feel wooden?  Why do I look at the news about COVID19 several times a day even knowing the confusion of information makes me feel like I’m inside the circus fun house?  I distract myself with Wordscapes; I scrub the kitchen sink when it doesn’t need scrubbing; I organize drawers; I pack my suitcases although I know I’m not leaving for at least a month. 

Quarantine happened. I did what I was supposed to do. In the little island of our apartment, I organized and made a schedule.  I make my bed, I drink coffee, I exercise, I eat breakfast, I try to write, I exercise, I eat an early supper, I go to bed.  I sweep, I scrub, I hang the laundry on our porch, I roast vegetables.  Little effort is required of me to maintain my needs. And the tasks I do, I do with a real, but really fleeting sense of accomplishment.

Why does the sameness of the my very-well-organized days, which allow me more freedom to write than I have ever had, leave me dull and wanting? 

Robinson Crusoe. On the surface, the analogy is ridiculous, I know. His “quarantine” was 1000 X more restrictive than mine, but maybe there is at least one parallel with these dull days. 

Crusoe’s behavior in his first months on the island was, by necessity, mechanistic. He needed to survive, to live. Ingenious in his attempts, he arranges his living space, searches, finds, and prepares food. He creates a dwelling/a life if not luxurious, at least comfortable. And, like the two of us, he lives in an emotionally closed system, his “conversation” culled from the mobius strip of his own emotions. 

Until he sees the footprint in the sand. 

Another person enters, and the phlegmatic world of singular survival and internal monologue changes in an instance. The book, until the footprint, is a fascinating survival guide and diary. After the footprint it becomes a story of human conflicts, racial prejudices, passions, fears, tension, values, and ultimately, friendship. 

This is the point in the book that in its extreme example, illuminates in reverse, writing during quarantine. 

The key is Friday. When Crusoe sees the footprint in the sand, his wooden world shifts. He is not alone! The sameness of the days in which he ingeniously builds, plants and fishes is shattered by his act of courage against the cannibals, by the presence of other humans. The emotions of human interchange enter the previously mechanistic world, where the reader saw only bursts of an emotional life. The challenges of human interactions arise: fear of others, confusion, uncertainty, demand for a courage that tests his compassion, and from then on decisions of interaction: the challenge of having power, of figuring out how to apply that power, the dance of getting to know/trust another human being, and ultimately the development of caring, not just for a built environment, but for another live person. The need to protect, the need to outwit the enemy, the need to spy and plot. 

These are the things of novels, of poems, of stories. They happen in the swirl of friends, enemies, acquaintances, unknown others, and simply put, I miss them, even today in the gentle quarantine of 2020, I have a partner in this quarantine, but after years of marriage we are something of a closed system, if  in fact a delightful closed system. There is nothing beyond us. We walk out disguised by mask and hat and gloves. On the street, the only dance is the quickstep when we skirt round each other as we pass. We do not meet friends, we have no misunderstandings in our half-learned Hebrew to delight or embarrass or surprise;  the flesh of culture / conflicts/ friendships has dissipated — no groups gather, at the store we stand online 2 meters apart each waiting patiently, silently so unlike the crowding bustle of Israelis in pre-COVID times. Walking the few hundred meters we are allowed from the apartment, our conversation dwindles to our own private interests or questions for the pharmacist or to repeat our member number at the grocery store.  

The apartment could be an apartment anywhere, the air blows through, the laundry gets done, dinner is fixed. I attend to my / our needs in the most ingenious way I can imagine, but the challenges that excite my emotions, aggravate my heart, and ignite my imagination are the people, the culture around me – and this is true no matter where I live.  It’s not that I don’t see people; it’s that I’m not involved with them, with their stories. It’s that I can’t touch them, can’t see my children’s expressive faces in person, laugh with my grandchildren, hug my friend’s on greeting. The gestures on the screen are flat; the tears of stories are pretend. This isolation, so much richer than Crusoe’s hardwearing years is deadening. 

So, I’ve decided: I’m just in the wooden days. I’ll keep the basics together and look forward to a tumbled, chaotic, haywire flesh-and-blood reality where, when I want to write, I have to waltz through the luscious flow of life.  

Shut in in Tel Aviv Breakfast

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A little over a month in isolation. We’re sticking to our schedule of making the bed, exercising, working, fixing meals. Without the schedule and the variation we can make within the confines of each activity, we would be overwhelmed by the enervating sameness of quarantine. The bare walls of the apartment would close in, the sounds of bottles crashing into the bin below by a neighbor’s hand and the lumbering roar of the street sweeping machine – even the children’s laughter from the street – would fade to background noise rather than making us run to the window to see or hear what’s happening.

Breakfast.  Something we can vary! We can be inventive about, plan for, especially now during Passover, when there is no bread. We have all the time we want to execute our food ideas: This morning it’s laban on matzah with lox, orange juice, and medjool dates.  Another day, a feta from goat’s milk to make an omelette, grapefruit; another day, fruit salad…… Lunch: fried eggplant over gnocchi, refried rice and vegetables, a big salad with tuna, lettuce, sweet red peppers, carrots, celery, tomatoes, red onion….  Supper:  practically nothing, a couple dates, some cottage cheese… 

If you are on social media you see, whether it’s quarantine or not, many people giving advice about the importance of breakfast, about what to eat for breakfast, about how to vary breakfasts, or specific recipes for smoothies, eggs, oatmeal….whatever.

This morning I wondered what famous people would say about breakfast.  As a mystery writer, I like Wilke Collins’s remarks the most. His words have panache, with an edge of menace appropriate to the father of the modern British detective novel:

“We had our breakfast–whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn’t matter, you must have your breakfast.”

Collins, raised in the Victorian era, was a British novelist, playwright and short story writer who wrote The Moonstone, The Woman in White, No Name and many other works. He was also a bohemian, an opium addict, a good friend of Charles Dickens, and a sort-of bigamist. (Can a man who lives with two women but never marries them be a bigamist?) People clamored for Collins’s stories because he wrote colorful, dramatic plots, and because some of his characters behaved scandalously, which according to current standards would be tame stuff, but must have seemed wonderfully naughty to Victorian readers, who stood in line waiting for the next installment of his serially published works. 

Well, enough. Have breakfast. Eat well. Enjoy quarantine as much as you can, and, as Josh Billings said:  

 “Never work before breakfast; if you have to work before breakfast, eat your breakfast first.” 

Shut in in Tel Aviv Exercise

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We’ve been in isolation for three weeks.

We had just come back from a trip to the north when the restrictions went into effect. Rested, having vacationed with good friends, we came back ready to be home and entered isolation with the idea of creating and sticking to a schedule, finishing writing projects, catching up with correspondence, and making healthy meals from the abundance of fruits and vegetables we get from a stand just a few blocks away. We had two weeks to go before flying back to the U.S. We’d use isolation as an opportunity to get things done.

Our tickets were cancelled. Most airlines stopped flying and even the ones that continued, were landing at U.S. airports where the crowds looked like petri dishes bubbling with virus.

We were in for the long haul.

Okay. I was ready. I had my schedule.

            In the certainty of my own strength, I wasn’t prepared for the downside of isolation. As time passed, little termites of frustration, loneliness (yes, you can be lonely even with another or others around) crept in. I had been sleeping well, but the insomnia blew in with the night wind one night and stayed. Some days the schedule falls apart, and I cling to the fact that at least I made my bed. I have to drug myself into oblivion to get some sleep, and then walk in the haze until noon the next day. A memory slams against me so hard I can barely stand; I feel the rapier of longing for my family and friends far away.

Where is my exuberance? My determination? My strength?

Am I a whimp?

I don’t think I am. And I don’t think any of us experiencing this same phenomenon during isolation are either. I think we’re experiencing an era of reactive loneliness, of the tightening of our usual freedoms. We’re understanding the heavy weight of responsibility for the community.

The only way I know to deal with this relentless, dulling sameness created by “You can’t…” is by exercise.

Exercise doesn’t prevent painful memories or regrets; it doesn’t cure the mind-whirl of insomnia, and it doesn’t change longing for family. But it does allow me to raise my endorphins and to play just a little:  

Of the 100 meters from the house I am allowed to move, how many configurations can I make? Of the thousands of aerobic exercises on YouTube, which combinations will I do today? When my sons were little I used to hold them and dance through the living room and kitchen. Today, which dance will carry me spinning toward the porch? I scrub, climb up and down the stairs of the apartment building; sprinkle the day with intervals of punching the air and flapping my arms and legs in some semblance of jumping jacks.

I may be slightly crazed by this isolation, by this bait-and-switch of emotions — but maybe my body can figure it out.

Shut in in Tel Aviv: Coffee

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In the last blog I wrote about making my bed. Why did I want to write about these homely details in the first place? What compelled me, in this isolation, to think on and write about such simple things? Can these everyday things broaden my world?  My answer is that if I look closely enough at anything and give it its due in thought or study, I’ll be off on a voyage through the world around me (or in my more professional writing, through the world I have created in my mind). For the duration of the pandemic isolation I have this apartment and what I do in it. I’m curious to know what I can learn here. The challenge given me is to face the mundane: to take a look at what’s happening in my small rooms.

There’s much to think about with a cup of coffee in your hand. The physical pleasure of holding this warm, sweet drink followed by a little jolt of vitality is enough, before all else, to raise a blessing on the tongue.

I look out the window, study the cumulus clouds ambling by on their way east and think of Jim Carrey’s morning musing:  “I wake up some mornings and look out at my beautiful garden and I go, ‘Remember how good this is. Because you can lose it.”

From the kitchen table, which doubles as my writing desk, a giant palm rises almost as high as the 5 stories of our apartment building. From where I sit, I can watch the ubiquitous little green parrots of Israel play in this palm and the hooded crow (corvus corone!) flutter along the trunk. The trunk of the palm is so close I could, if I wanted, take the few steps to the window and reach out to touch the jagged bark. But today, holding my coffee, I stare out the window past the palm to the street below where early risers walk toward the store, their rolling shopping carts rattling behind them. Some are in masks, some barefaced, some wear gloves, some not. Beside some, children, oblivious to the dangers in a touch or handshake, dart back and forth, giggling along an erratic path only they can see.

From the kids, Bach comes to mind. In an unusual burst of secular creativity, Bach wrote The Coffee Cantata, a little comic opera.  In it a lively young woman loves coffee. Her father orders her to stop drinking it; she persists until he threatens he won’t allow her to marry unless she relinquishes coffee. She agrees, but secretly sends words to her prospective lovers that she won’t consider any one of them who doesn’t include in the marriage contract that she is allowed her 3 cups a day.

. . . .

Ah, How sweet coffee does taste,

Better than a thousand kisses,

Milder than Muscat Wine.

Coffee, coffee, I’ve got to have it;

And if someone wants to perk me up,

Oh, just give me a cup of coffee. . . .

J.S. Bach Kantate BWV211, ca. 1735

(To listen to the whole thing, go to openculture.com)

Coffee has a history of over 600 years replete with legends of its discovery, of travel, intrigue, slavery, seduction, betrayal, sainthood… much of this before it was even poured into its first cup in North America.

One legend says coffee was discovered around 850 by the Ethiopian goat herder, Kaldi, who noticed that his goats, after eating berries from a certain bush, “danced,” so he tried it himself, to the same effect. He then carried the beans to an Islamic monk in a Sufi monastery, who tasted the beans, was disgusted by their bitterness, and threw them into the fire. The aroma of the roasting beans filled the air, and the monk, in an epiphany and sudden conversion, quickly raked them out of the fire and threw them in water.

Ecco!  The first cup of coffee!

Other legends say the discovery of coffee was made by a Moroccan Sufi mystic, Ghothul Akbar Noorudin Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, who saw that birds experienced an unusual vitality from eating the beans of a certain bush. Intrigued, he tried it himself. . .

And still other legends say it was his disciple, Omar, who, after being exiled to a cave in the wilderness without food, survived by chewing the beans of a nearby bush. Eventually, Omar was forgiven, brought back to town, and made a saint. 

Was he made a saint because of the coffee beans? I don’t know, maybe it helped.

Whatever mix of these legends is true, the first substantive evidence of drinking or knowledge of coffee is from a Sufi monastery in Yemen. And from Yemen the news and the beans travel fast, despite bans by Islamic leaders and the Catholic Church. The ancestors of the beans that make the warm liquid so many of us hold in our hands at the breakfast table were carried from Cairo, to Mecca, and by the 16th century, throughout the Middle East, South India, Persia, Turkey, Horn of Africa, North Africa, up to the Balkans, Italy, the rest of Europe, and to SE Asia.

Today thieves steal money; in 1719, thieves with promise of rich reward from the government of French Guyana, stole coffee plants from Surinam, and coffee beans were on the road again. A few years later, eyeing the success of French Guyana’s coffee trade, the governor of the Brazilian state of Para sent his own thief, young Sergeant Franciso de Melo to French Guyana to bring back some beans.

An illegal act. What could de Melo do? 

“Baby it’s you. . .you’re the one I need. . .” sings Beyonce.  It could have been de Melo’s song.

The wife of the governor of French Guyana succumbed to de Melo’s charms and at the moment of  their sad goodbyes the distressed wife of the governor offered de Melo a big bouquet of flowers with a coffee-bean plant tucked discreetly in the center. Anticipating his reward from the governor of Para, basking in the memory of the wife of the governor of French Guyana, and salivating in anticipation of his first cup of Brazilian coffee while sitting on his porch in the cool morning air, de Melo returns to Para, bouquet in hand.

Thus begins Brazil’s coffee industry.

It took a while from the days of the love affair to the year 1852 ,when Brazil became the world’s largest producer of coffee. In the meantime, Saint Dominique had edged in, and by use of brutal slave labor to plant, raise, harvest, and export coffee beans, was supplying one-half the world’s coffee, retaining power over the market until the Haitian Revolution.

Today, I understand that this is no simple brown liquid I hold in the cup in my hand. A thousand stories wait in every sip.

Next: Keeping the mind ramped.

Shut in in Tel Aviv: Make My Bed

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One Writer’s Daily Schedule for Living in Isolation

In the last posting, I wrote about being stranded in Tel Aviv because of COVID19 and my necessity, as a writer, to handle being isolated in the apartment.  My answer was to make a strict daily schedule. This post begins an outline of that schedule.

William H. McRaven, (ret’d) a four-star navy admiral, expert in counterterrorism and strategy who oversaw and executed Operation Neptune Spear said: 

“If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. And by the end of the day, that one task completed, will have turned into many tasks completed.”

His reasoning makes sense to me, and I like the idea of a four-star admiral advising us to make our beds. So, the first item on the daily schedule is to make my bed. 

The days pass.

I get up and make the bed. 

The general was right. Even before I’m out of my pajamas, I feel like I’ve accomplished something. And after making the bed, it seems natural to follow with other small tasks. I pull back the ceiling-to-floor curtains that enclose the porch, and then open every window in the apartment. 

What difference does it make to me, as a writer, to have a schedule, to organize my day, to be orderly? What is the admiral trying to say?

This is what happens:

Cross currents of cool morning air come rushing through the rooms, ushering in the squeaky voices of children and the gruff barks of dogs from the street below. (People with dogs and children or both are allowed outside.) One parent or the other parents other strolls along, coffee in hand, patiently attending to their child’s running commentary about the sticks on the sidewalk.)

A gentle breeze stirs the curtains, glides over chairs and couch, along the television, over the books and wraps itself around my shoulders. Living now in an aura of fear, I take great pleasure in this river of air flowing over me. Here is an invisible gassy mix of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, a little water vapor, and a tiny percent of other gasses rushing in the window refreshing me after a night’s sleep. And here are my lungs, threatened by COVID19, but for the moment, capturing the air, the oxygen, and expelling CO2 for the plants.

In bringing concentration to simple tasks, I discover that I start the day not just with my bed made, but with conscious attention to detail. This apartment and my journeys within it provide me with a much bigger world than I have ever acknowledged.

In the next blog, I get coffee, Yeah!! And I discover that this warm, sweet drink has a mottled history of adventure, seduction, and betrayal.

Shut in in Tel Aviv: Introduction

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How it happened   

COVID19 came on fast. Steve and I were packing for the trip back to the United States for Passover with family and friends when PM Netanyahu announced the first restrictions on movement:  the drivers of busses were cordoned off from riders, stores selling unnecessary goods were to close, and with the exception of health care and other essential workers, all people were to go into mandatory isolation in their homes. 

We thought, “Well, we’re leaving soon so we’ll be confined for a only few days in our apartment on Sokolov Street.”  I continued packing, cleared out drafts of a recent mystery I’d sent off, organized files on the computer and made new files for the small amount of hard copy I had brought with me to Israel months ago. 

We soon realized it wasn’t to be just a few days. Not long after Netanyahu’s announcement, Delta sent us as email to say our flight was canceled.  We tried to call the Delta office; it had abruptly closed. An email from Delta said they would reschedule. 

I continued to think some flight would turn up, the crowding and herding of people in the U.S. airports would be solved, everyone would be careful, and the crisis would disappear. 

Then the dominos began to fall.

The reschedule never came, and one by one alternatives disappeared. Delta stopped flying to Israel, United flights became sketchy, uncertain. Flights to the U.S. from Europe were prohibited by the U.S. so we couldn’t go that route; Turkey shut down.  Doors were closing; our sons in the U.S. urged us to stay in place because the U.S. was not handling the situation well. Each state was making its own restrictions, and the federal government was sluggish in its response to the needs of the states. The U.S. appeared to be a nation confused.

Since we were stuck, I decided I’d use the time to get more writing done. I could pretend I was in a comfortable prison with lax restrictions that allowed me to walk 100 meters from my “cell” and to go to the grocery store or pharmacy when I needed. 

But, there were problems. I could no longer escape the particular distractions of working at our apartment kitchen table by running off early morning to my secluded corner in the café on Arlozorov. 

I needed to make a new schedule that would suit both my husband (also a writer) and I. It turned out to be a good idea, and it turned out we would be following the new schedule for much longer than a week……

In coming postings, I’ll be outlining 

One Writer’s Daily Schedule for Living in Isolation