Quiz #25. The onion
Onions, prunes and other advice from those who've gone before us in Steve's Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz for April 10, 2020
He doesn’t work in news, but my son Ted is one of the most informed people I know. He’s on top of the news and what’s happening in the world--all thanks to Twitter. After an April 3rd government briefing on the coronavirus pandemic, it was Ted who told me in a phone call about an inappropriate remark about models from the president that had spread on Twitter like wildfire. (We need a different metaphor than “viral” tweets).
After my phone call with Ted, I told Sara, John and Will about the reported remark. Sara could not believe that it was true. Using a term which Ted and others have widely used, she said it had to be “fake news.” A search of reputable news organizations soon revealed that it was not.
These are strange times and these days it’s hard to tell the satirical headlines of “The Onion” from the real thing. In his Thursday, April 9th Understandably newsletter titled, “Well that was awkward,” Bill Murphy Jr. reported on a parody letter that’s been going around the internet. It purports to be a letter written by F. Scott Fitzgerald while in quarantine with wife Zelda in 1920, somewhere nearby Ernest Hemingway. The parody letter written by Nick Farriella reads, “At this time, it seems very poignant to avoid all public spaces. Even the bars, as I told Hemingway, but to that he punched me in the stomach, to which I asked if he had washed his hands. He hadn’t. He is much the denier, that one. Why, he considers the virus to be just influenza. I’m curious of his sources.”
Murphy goes on to point out that the letter is based in some historical fact. Hemingway was quarantined in the late 1920’s--with his wife, a sick toddler and his mistress. The humor of this situation aside, one of Murphy’s points is that pandemics and quarantines have happened before, “... all of this craziness we’re living through has happened before. We know this objectively but it’s hard sometimes to imagine. Maybe you’re not quarantined with your spouse and child and paramour (or your spouse’s paramour). But humanity has suffered and recovered.”
Today, Friday, March 10th, marks the one-month mark of my own stay-at-home quarantine.
On Monday, March 9th, I made my last trip into work in New York City. The night before, the State Department had issued its advisory that all U.S. citizens not get on a cruise ship. The stock market was reeling that morning as the country seemed to be slowly coming to grips with even just a glimmer of what was coming. Still, the “stay-at-home” order for New York City would not come for another week and the notion of staying at home still seemed completely alien--again just one month ago. Sara and I had begun stockpiling groceries on the weekends after reading the CDC’s memo on preparedness from February 25th. And yet, at the work lunch I attended that Monday, March 10th, we talked about the coronavirus--and no one else at the table had begun to buy.
We’re all now trying to grocery shop two weeks at a time. When John and Will went grocery shopping for us on Wednesday, March 31st, Sara gave them lists. Any fruit had to have a covering like an orange and any vegetable had to be something she could cook. She asked the boys to buy onions and this Monday, April 5th, she fried up some onions with kale for dinner. It filled the house with a wonderful smell.
At dinner, Sara told us that onions always reminded her of her grandmother on her mother’s side, Rachel Masteller. She told us in great detail about how she remembered the extended garden that her grandmother had behind the family house, filled with fruits and vegetables. All summer, she’d grow and pick them, canning them and storing the food for winter in shelves that lined her basement walls. Sara remembered her mother’s stories of how they had shared that food with their extended family during the depression and also sent food on a train to her father in Philadelphia where he was working. Sara told our family that she was cooking so many onions now because of her memories of her grandmother Rachel always telling her that eating onions “kept us healthy and strong.” In a conversation Sara had with her sister Ginnie, they remembered that their grandmother would often eat a raw onion or chives to ward off an illness.
Sara with her grandmother, Rachel Masteller, circa 1966
In this quiz, I have discussed how I always purchase prunes in times of stress. I can’t think of prunes without thinking of my own grandmother on my father's side, Adele Thode. She drank prune juice every day. I still remember the taste and smell. (I can’t stand prune juice. Prunes themselves are much better.) She knew. Prunes and--if you can stomach it-- prune juice serve a vital function. There’s a reason people used to say, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”
Adele Thode, my grandmother, and me, circa 1967
In the world before the internet, they knew. They didn’t have smart phones to make them dumber.
Growing up as a baby boomer, we all knew people, often family and sometimes older friends, who “grew up in the depression.” We’d use that phrase to describe their frugal, don’t-let-anything-go-to-waste ways. It wasn’t always a compliment--being thrifty seemed at such odds with our abundance. When you could get almost anything at your doorstep 24 hours after clicking on it on Amazon, saving something for later seemed otherworldly.
And yet, here we are in another world. Maybe we should have listened to our grandparents? Please pass the onions.
Many of those people who grew up during the depression are already gone--and the rest now face a daunting new challenge. The savage cruelty of coronavirus is that it’s the most deadly for those most elderly. For me, beyond my grandmother Adele’s prune juice, I am sorry to say that I do not have sage advice from my grandparents. I cribbed that from Sara--and except for my grandmother Adele, all my grandparents died before I was ten. At this time of loss for so many, for me, memories are all that’s left of my grandparents and my own parents. RIP.
What did NOT happen?
A. When my father showed us kids the family slides, he’d always stop at one, showing my family at the beach with his parents. He’d say, “That was the day Dad died.” That was my grandfather, Ed Thode;
B. My grandmother Adele had a sister Alice. They both lived into their ‘80s. I remember as a child being stunned when they’d say goodbye to one another at family functions. My aunt Allce would always say, “Well, Adele, if I don’t see you in heaven, I’ll see you in the other place;”
C. When my grandfather on my mother’s side, Bob Donahue, died of cancer in the early ‘60s, I remember we all visited him one last time at his house. He was sick and in bed. I made a sign, painted in pink and black. We called him “Par;”
D. The last time I was with my grandmother on my mother’s side, Marian, we watched Ed Sullivan on TV. I had no idea it would be the last time I would see her;
E. My father died on Good Friday in 2016. (I’ve never understood why they call today “Good” Friday.)
Adele and Ed Thode, my grandparents, with my mother Jeanne and sisters Ginny and Susan. August 25, 1959. My grandfather died that night of a heart attack.
Want the answer?
Answer #25. The Onion, April 10, 2020
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Want more?
Here’s the next quiz in the series: Quiz #26. Fantastic
Here’s the previous quiz in the series: Quiz #24. “A Baby Aquarium.”
Here’s the first quiz in the series: Quiz #1. Stella and Social Distancing, March 13, 2020
The quiz is explained here: Steve’s Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz.
Here is an archive of all the quizzes.
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