Of COVID & coffee

I mentioned on Facebook recently that I hadn't been in a Starbucks since the pandemic hit last March. A friend (who lives in a different province) commented, "Wow, your lockdown must be pretty tight. I go to Starbucks at least twice a week for my favourite Chai latte."  I responded, "They're open (for takeout anyway) -- we just haven't gone."  

I try not to be too judgmental about other people's choices during this pandemic -- but I've been thinking about that exchange since then, and what it says about the pandemic and about the different attitudes and ways of coping that people have about it. 

Being retired (and yes, being childless), I know dh & I are EXTREMELY fortunate right now, compared to some of our peers. We don't have jobs and commutes and coworkers to contend with. Or parents nearby to look in on and grocery shop for and take to medical appointments. Or kids to contend with or worry about, or grandchildren to babysit. (Oh, that we had grandchildren to babysit...!)  For the most part, we don't HAVE to go out (and expose ourselves to the virus), unless we really want or need to.  

And so we generally don't, unless we need groceries, prescriptions or personal care items. (Dh prefers to choose his own groceries versus ordering online for delivery or pickup, but we try to plan as much as possible to minimize the number of trips he makes -- generally once a week.)  Even when more things were open, we didn't go a whole lot more places. We haven't been inside a restaurant to eat (or even on a restaurant patio, when they were open -- although dh does go for takeout on Saturday nights) or in a mall to shop since last March. We haven't seen much of our adorable Great-Nephew, especially since the cold weather arrived ( = indoor visits), even though it's (figuratively) killing us not to, when he's so close by.  

Probably the one thing we've indulged in most (aside from haircuts every six weeks, when it was allowed) was trips to the bookstore, when it opened again last summer after the initial lockdown. Even so, we didn't go nearly as often (nor stay as long) as in pre-COVID times. Our closest Starbucks is in the same space as the bookstore;  pre-COVID, we used to go there first, get our coffee/tea latte and then stroll around, browsing the bookshelves and sipping our drinks.  

The bookstore isn't open right now (curbside pickup only), but when it was (this past summer/fall), no food or drinks were allowed. (You obviously can't wear a mask and drink coffee at the same time, and masks are mandatory.) The after-hours divider/barrier between the coffee counter and the bookstore stayed up all the time now, so you couldn't easily move from one part of the building to the other. You could go in one door for a browse in the bookstore, or you could go in the other door to the Starbucks and pick up something to drink (&/or to snack on), and take it outside or home -- but not both. 

Obviously, there's nothing stopping us from going into Starbucks for a coffee, as my friend does. It remains open, even though the bookstore is not. I've asked dh a few times, as we left the bookstore, if he wanted to duck in there and pick up something to take in the car with us. He said no. 

I was fine with that. We'd already spent a half-hour in the bookstore. We didn't really NEED his short mild coffee or my tall non-fat English breakfast tea latte, or the additional exposure to the baristas and other patrons in the now-socially distanced lineup (or to spend $7 on something we could make when we got home for a fraction of the price, for that matter...!).  

Mel had a post recently about a "pandemic risk budget" -- a system set up by some housemates to protect themselves from COVID-19. Obviously, anything we do outside the security of our own homes is risky, to some extent.  And how much additional risk we're obligated or willing to take on will vary from one person to the next. 

But it seems foolish to try to pretend that COVID-19 doesn't exist, and that we can still do all the things we would normally be doing and go all the places we would normally go without taking on some element of risk (even when we're all wearing masks and sanitizing our hands as we enter stores and trying to stay at least six feet apart while we're in there).  Just because a store or restaurant is open doesn't mean we should go in there, unless we really need to.  The more you go out, the more stores you go in & out of, the more restaurant patios you dine out on (when the weather allowed it), the more people you interact with or share the same space with (even briefly), the more risk you expose yourself to. 

Maybe dh & I are suckers for spending most of the past year sitting at home on our butts, when we could have been out shopping and eating on restaurant patios and having fun like so many friends & family members seem to be doing (judging from the photos we've seen on social media). (Sometimes I feel like we are.) 

But we've been asked (told!), by our governments and health officials, to stay at home as much as possible and minimize contact with people outside our own households. I guess we all have to decide how to spend our pandemic risk budgets -- what's most important to us and what's not, beyond the basics of food & prescriptions. For dh & me, that doesn't include Starbucks (much as I love their tea lattes).  

I try not to fault people when I hear they've been to the mall (when the mall was open), or to someone's house or yard, or to the beach or a pool party last summer, or to a friend's cottage up north. (I try not to get pissed off when I hear voices & laughter in the hallway outside our condo unit door -- not so much because of the noise factor -- although that can bug me too! -- but because someone on the floor has clearly had visitors, when we're not supposed to be in each other's homes.)  I know that, for the most part, most people are doing the best they can in a very difficult situation. 

It's been a hard year. It's HARD staying at home all the time and not seeing people. (Even when you're introverts like me & dh.)   

But I think it would be a whole lot harder watching someone I love get sick from COVID-19. (Or worse.) Or getting it myself. Or knowing that someone close to me got sick, because I just had to have that Starbucks latte. 

It's a pandemic, people.  It's not a normal situation, so I'm not sure why some people still keep trying to act like it is. 

Odds & ends

• The New York Times had an article last weekend, about the intersection of celebrity, social media and commerce:  "Celebrity Pregnancy Is Big Business."  (What, they only JUST noticed?!)  
• Somewhat pleasant surprise:  towards the end, there's a discussion about what happens when a very public pregnancy goes wrong (example: Chrissy Teigen).  
• Jan. 25th marked one year since the first COVID-19 patient was diagnosed in Canada, and there were lots of "one year later" retrospective pieces in the media. I'll probably be doing one myself, but closer to March 12th, which is what I think of as "the last normal day" -- one day after the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, and shortly before the Ontario provincial government announced a state of emergency.  
• Today's Facebook Memories turned up my first COVID-19-related post from last year -- I shared a New York Times article about the importance of hand washing to avoid the coronavirus. Little did we know then...!  
• Manitoba eased some of its COVID-19 restrictions last weekend, which meant my sister & her partner were able to spend last weekend with my parents for the first time since well before Christmas, and do some things around the house, one week after our 81-year-old dad slipped and fell on the driveway and cracked two ribs. Dad apparently told the boyfriend that he's feeling a bit better -- and he tends to be more honest with him than he is with any of us...!  So we'll take that as a good sign.  

"American Baby" by Gabrielle Glaser

I first heard about the new book "American Baby" by Gabrielle Glaser when I read a review by Lisa Belkin in the New York Times last weekend. By the time I was barely a few paragraphs into the article, I knew I wanted to read this book, and I downloaded a copy to my e-reader as soon as it became available (yesterday morning). I finished it this afternoon. I also listened to the author being interviewed on the Times's Book Review podcast. 

"American Baby" uses the story of David Rosenberg (born in 1961, the same year as me) & his birth mother, Margaret Erle Katz, to tell a broader story about the history and ethics of adoption in America, and its impact on all three members of the adoption triangle -- birth parents, adoptive parents and the adoptees themselves. And, linking them all, the adoption agencies, social workers and lawyers, who sometimes pressured, coerced and threatened the mothers into relinquishing their babies, often falsified the few details they provided to both birth mothers and adoptive parents, and profited from their losses and pain.  

In this case, the adoption agency was Louise Wise Services in New York City (and its affiliated maternity home on Staten Island, Lakeview), which provided babies used in the infamous "twins experiment," in which at least 11 sets of twins and one set of triplets (whose stories have been told in the book "Identical Strangers" and the documentaries "Three Identical Strangers" and "The Twinning Reaction") were deliberately separated and then studied. 

Essentially, Glaser argues, the history of adoption in the 20th century was "a massive experiment in social engineering" fraught with shame, fear, secrecy and lies, in an era before second-wave feminism, sex education, modern birth control, safe and legal abortions, and modern infertility treatments. The book is full of fascinating details and historical context. We learn about life in a maternity home (a basket of gold wedding bands was kept by the door for the girls to put on when they went out in public), about the sometimes horrific experiments conducted on babies in foster care before they were finally adopted, about how the practice of sealing original birth certificates came about, about the rise of the adoption rights movement in the 1970s, and about how modern DNA testing is making once-unimaginable family reunions possible.   

This was an absolutely riveting book -- I could not put it down. The story of naive teenaged parents Margaret & George, who desperately wanted to marry and keep their baby, was sweet and heartbreaking. I shed tears at several points in the story.    

It's a book that deserves to be widely read, and should be required reading for anyone considering adoption -- or perhaps for anyone who dares to ask an infertile couple, "Why don't you just adopt?" Things may be different today, yes -- but perhaps not different enough -- not yet. The old attitudes, myths and misconceptions about adoption linger. While greater openness is increasingly common, adoption records remain sealed in many jurisdictions around the world, and many adoptive parents still request "traditional" closed adoptions. And there are echoes of the past in the growing use of eggs and sperm from anonymous donors in fertility treatments, and in the questions of the children conceived this way. Apparently, we still have lessons to learn...

(My one (relatively minor) quibble with the book (the e-version that I read, anyway) is that I wish the notes at the back were accessible through clickable links. There's a lot of great information there.) 

5 stars on Goodreads. 

This was Book #5 read to date in 2021 (and Book #5 finished in January), bringing me to 14% of my 2021 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 36 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 3 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2021 tagged as "2021 books." 

"The Truths We Hold" by Kamala Harris

Appropriately, I started reading "The Truths We Hold: An American Journey" by Kamala Harris on Inauguration Day, shortly after watching Harris be sworn in as the United States' 49th vice-president -- the first woman, first African-American and first South Asian-American to hold the office in the nation's history. 

This book -- part memoir, part policy statement/manifesto -- was published two years earlier, in January 2019 -- the same month Harris announced her candidacy for the Democratic Party nomination for president.  It interweaves her thoughts on various policy issues with her remarkable personal story and her rise to national office. She's obviously very knowledgeable on the issues and very articulate at expressing her opinions. It's clear she wanted to use this book to position herself for presidential run. But it was the personal stories -- about her early life, her immigrant/activist parents, her marriage to Douglas Emhoff -- that I found most interesting.  

As a Canadian, I was (naturally) very interested in what she had to say about the time she spent in Montreal, when her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, got a job as a breast cancer researcher at the Jewish General Hospital and lecturer at McGill University.  Disappointingly, the Canadian content is pretty skimpy, and Harris makes it pretty clear that she was relieved to head back to the States when she was finished high school. The years Harris lived in Montreal (approximately 1976 to 1981, from the time she was 12 through her graduation from Westmount High School) were among some of the most politically turbulent in Quebec/Canadian history, with a separatist government (led by a highly colourful premier, Rene Levesque) running the show. Perhaps that coloured her impressions -- perhaps, as a teenaged newcomer, she didn't really understand what was going on around her -- or perhaps she or her editors felt it was best not to comment on that highly charged and complex topic (which is hard enough for Canadians to understand, let alone Americans)...!  She writes about her struggles to learn French and the difficult time she had attending a French-language school when she arrived. And of course, she complains about the snow & cold. ;)  She says she eventually adjusted, but she was "homesick for my country. I felt this constant sense of yearning to be back home. There was no question in my mind I'd return home for college." Well, allrighty then... 

I've mentioned this to a few friends who pointed out that Harris has already received enough flack and doubts about her "legitimacy" to run for the presidency because of her immigrant parents (much as Barack Obama did) without drawing attention to the fact that she spent several years living outside the country too. Plus, there simply isn't a lot of political payoff for her to draw attention to her ties to Canada either. (Maybe it's just my Canadian inferiority complex showing, lol.) I'll be curious to see whether she makes more of her Canadian connection in her new role as vice-president. 

Anyway. 

One other disappointment:  many of us in the childless/free community are thrilled to claim Kamala Harris as one of our own -- but there is no reflection here on how she felt about remaining single and childless into her late 40s, and no mention of any previous relationships. She does express a few trepidations about meeting her husband's two children/her future stepchildren for the first time, but obviously takes great pride in her role as their "Momala," as well as her relationships as an aunt, great-aunt and godmother.  

This is a good intro to Kamala Harris, her life story, career path and politics -- and it's quite readable -- but it just skims the surface. I didn't close the book feeling completely satisfied.  I wanted to know MORE. I understand it's her prerogative not to share everything about her life, but she's a public figure (now vice-president of the United States!), and a game-changing one at that. I wish she had chosen to be a little more forthcoming and candid and didn't gloss over certain aspects of her life so much. Besides childlessness, and marriage and step-motherhood at midlife, I would like to know more about her father (he drops out of the picture pretty quickly after her parents divorce, and reportedly they are estranged these days), about her grandparents, and her impressions of India and Zambia and Jamaica, after visiting her relatives there. She writes about health care (& notes how much cheaper prescription drugs are here), but what (if anything) did she learn about the Canadian health care system while living here, and while her mother worked within the system? 

Perhaps she'll write another book that reveals more, once her political career is behind her. I hope so.

3.5 stars on Goodreads, rounded down to 3. It was an interesting read, but I couldn't bring myself to give it a full 4 stars, given the reservations I've outlined above. 

This was Book #4 read to date in 2021 (and Book #4 finished in January), bringing me to 11% of my 2021 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 36 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 2 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2021 tagged as "2021 books." 

#MicroblogMondays: Tackling the TBR list/pile

I didn't have a #MM post planned for today, and was wondering what I should write about... and then I saw Mel's #MM post, lol. I started writing a comment, which got to be kind of long, and realized, hey, there's my post!  lol  

Mel's post was about an idea that she (and I) saw on Modern Mrs. Darcy's blog -- which suggests making a TBR (to be read) priority list of your top five "want to read" books on a post-it note, and choose the next book you read from there. 

I'm not sure a post-it note would work for me (let alone a list of just 5! -- although I do make lots of other kinds of lists on post-it notes that get stuck in my Filofax planner) -- but I'm toying with the idea of  trying some kind of "priority TBR" list or pile. (Again.) I've made piles of books to read next before, but they tend to get kind of unwieldy after a while.  :)  My problems are (a) just too damn many unread books to get to  (insert red-faced icon)  ;) and (b) something new & shiny comes along that gets put on the top of the pile. 

In terms of how I decide what to read next: books to be read for book clubs obviously get first priority -- but after that, it's generally the most recent book I've bought, or something else (usually relatively recent) that I've wanted to read, or something relevant to something else that I read or saw on the news or something like that. Sometimes I feel like I need a break from non-fiction (especially the political books I've been reading lately...!) and want to read something more frivolous so I pick up a novel -- or vice-versa. 

So far this month/year I've read "Hoax" by Brian Stelter (which I picked up earlier in the fall and wanted to finish)... "Confessions of a Forty-Something" by Alexandra Potter  (for the Gateway Women book club -- which, happily, turned out to be a fabulous pick!)...  and "The Jane Austen Society" by Natalie Jenner (bought earlier in the summer/fall, and I was in the mood for something Jane Austenish) -- all reviewed here on my blog.  

I'm currently reading Kamala Harris's memoir, "The Truths We Hold,"  for obvious reasons. ;)  I am thinking Richard Osman's "The Thursday Murder Club" next (which several friends have read & loved), but we'll see.  There's a new book coming out tomorrow that I read about in the New York Times called "American Baby" by Gabrielle Glasser, about the history and ethics of adoption in America, that sounds really interesting... you see how easily I get sidetracked?? lol  

Some of the books I've been meaning to get to for quite a while now include "Us Against You" and "Anxious People" by Fredrik Backman (after reading & loving "Beartown" for my library book club), "The Huntress" by Kate Quinn (after reading & enjoying "The Alice Network" for my library book club -- and she has a new book coming out soon too... gahhhhh...), "My Dark Vanessa" by Kate Elizabeth Russell (which I keep putting off, even though several people I know have read it & rated it highly, because it sounds... dark... and I need to be in the right frame of mind to tackle something like that), and "Maisie Dobbs" by Jacqueline Winspear, which By the Brooke recommended to me a long time ago.  ;) 

How do you decide?  And what books are on your perennial TBR list/pile? 

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts (and comments about MMD's priority TBR list idea!) here. 

Odds & ends

• On yesterday's U.S. presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C.:  
• So happy to watch -- and so relieved that everything came off without a hitch!  (I got up late, got watching TV and wound up staying in my pajamas, unshowered, until after 1 p.m...!)  I know my scale would beg to differ (lol) but it felt like a huge weight coming off my shoulders...!  
• I cried as Justice Sonia Sotomayor swore in Vice-President Kamala Harris. I wish Geraldine Ferraro could have seen this day.  I was 23 years old when she became the first woman nominated for that post (alongside Walter Mondale in 1984);  it's taken nearly 40 years (!!!) for a woman to actually make it to the second-highest office in the land. (Just think how awesome it will feel the day Madam President is finally sworn in...!) 
• I cried again when I saw a friend's photo on Facebook & Instagram of her young daughter, watching as Harris took the oath of office. I wish my daughter had been here to see this day too. 
• The first post I saw in my Facebook feed yesterday morning was one of my American MAGA relatives posting "It's a sad day for America." I promptly put that person on snooze for 30 days (and am considering unfollowing altogether...). 
• I was happy to watch the first edition of what's promised to be a regular, daily press briefing under the new administration, with press secretary Jen Psaki. I like her, and I am grateful for the change of tone -- a real, live, proper, serious press conference, minus the snark and disdain and overall lack of respect for the press we've been subjected to for the past four years. 
• HOWEVER, that said... I noticed she used the phrase "as a mom" no less than two or three times in the first 20 minutes. Sigh... 
• On the aging parents front: 
• When I talked to my parents on Sunday, I learned my 81-year-old dad had slipped & fallen on some ice on Friday, while scraping fresh snow off the driveway. He had to CRAWL into the garage & managed to pull himself up on something in there. No bruising, but he was very sore... and the pain increased over the following days. 
• My sister called me last night to say he FINALLY managed to get in to see a doctor that day (hard to do, with current COVID-19 restrictions...). He sent dad for an X-ray. Turns out he has two cracked ribs. :(  Not much they can do about it. He gave Dad some painkillers and told them it will take about a month to fully heal. :( 
• My dad is the glue that holds things together there these days... my mother, who just turned 80, has mobility issues and is easily distracted (among other things), and so he does all the cooking, most of the grocery shopping & errands, etc.  
• My sister says the buzz is that the provincial government there may be lifting some of the COVID-19 restrictions this weekend, which would allow her to visit them and do some things around the house (including cooking some meals she can leave with them for reheating). If so, she will head out there this weekend to do what she can (and she may just go, even if the restrictions aren't officially lifted).  One of Mom & Dad's neighbours has brought over dinner a couple of times this week, which is very kind of her, but obviously we can't expect her to do that forever. :( 
• It could have been a whole lot worse... but it still sucks.  And it sucks to be living so far away at a time like this, even without the complicating factor of a pandemic. :(  
• According to this vaccine calculator, dh & I won't be getting vaccinated until late June/early September (using current calculations, anyway). That means I won't be getting home to see my parents & sister this summer either, for the second year in a row. :(  I'm still hoping for next Christmas, though...! 
• It's been dark, grey, dreary and increasingly cold outside... I feel my usual post-Christmas/birthday/inauguration funk setting in -- with the additional factor of COVID-19 this year...! :(  
• We're a week into our latest lockdown/stay at home order... a week past our nomal "due date" for haircuts (7 weeks past our last trims)... and my shaggy, bushy hair is already driving me nuts. :(   And it will be another month, at the very least (and probably longer), before the salons will reopen...! I'm fine with wearing masks everywhere, social distancing, vaccinations, not going out for dinner, not going to the mall, even not going to the bookstore (lol)... but not getting a regular haircut?  HEEEELLLLLLPPPPPP.... 
• Jody Day of Gateway Women has started a new project to explore life as a "Conscious Childless Elderwoman." Aging is a huge concern for many women facing life without children -- and yet most of the literature out there on menopause and aging assumes there are children and grandchildren in the picture who will help. That just not the case, even for many women (and men) who DO have children and grandchildren. Have a read, and sign up for the newsletter if you're interested! 

"The Jane Austen Society" by Natalie Jenner

I wouldn't call myself a Jane Austen expert, but I have read and enjoyed three of her novels (so far...!) -- "Emma" (for a class at university), "Pride and Prejudice" and "Sense and Sensibility" (on my own).  In the early days of ALI blogging, we read & discussed "The Jane Austen Book Club" by Karen Joy Fowler for our Barren B*tches book club. 

So I was predisposed to pick up "The Jane Austen Society" by Natalie Jenner (who, I discovered from the jacket copy, is a British-born Canadian, who owns an independent bookstore in Oakville, west of Toronto). (It didn't hurt that it was on sale for 40% off -- or that Anne Bogel/Modern Mrs. Darcy recommended it either, lol.)  

The story is mostly set in the English village of Chawton just after the Second World War. Chawton is a real-life place, where Jane Austen spent the last several years of her life and wrote her three final novels. More than 100 years after her death, she continues to attract visitors to the village. Loosely based on the story behind the real-life Jane Austen Society, the book follows a number of different (fictional) characters -- locals and others -- and how they come together to form the society to help preserve Austen's legacy. I'll admit I had trouble keeping all of them and their storylines straight, at least at first. By the end of the book, however, they had all become very dear to me, and I was cheering for them all (even as some of their storylines wrapped up in rather predictable ways...!).   

The book makes liberal references & allusions to Austen's novels, and it would probably help if you have at least some familiarity with her work.  If you haven't read any Austen previously, I'm betting you will probably want to pick one of her books up after you finish this one!  There are echoes here of "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" (which I've read a couple of times, and reviewed here) -- the similar post-war time frame, English village setting and the love of literature. 

**SPOILER/TRIGGER/ALI ALERT BELOW**:   

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There is a pregnancy loss in this book, and themes of grief & loss are prominent throughout.  

Four stars on Goodreads 

This was Book #3 read to date in 2021 (and Book #3 finished in January), bringing me to 8% of my 2021 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 36 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 2 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2021 tagged as "2021 books."