Quiz #31. "It looks weird."

April 19, 2020, Steve's Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz

Apr 20, 2020

There’s a broken living room chair in the middle of our kitchen. It’s been there for more than a month now. Sometimes it gets in the way and it doesn’t look great. Shabby chic? Not exactly--and yet, I don’t think we’ll be moving it out anytime soon. With everything that’s going on--a global pandemic, thousands of Americans dying every day, nursing home nightmares of bodies in overstuffed morgues--a broken chair in the middle of the kitchen hardly feels like something to be worried about.

It’s a small part of what people these days are calling “the new normal.” I first wrote about the broken chair in the middle of our kitchen in my first Coronavirus Quiz, #Quiz #1. Stella and Social Distancing on March 14, 2020. Back then, there were no “stay-at-home” orders. I was practicing social distancing on my own. I joked then--and it’s still true now--that 63 years of social distancing has finally paid off for me. On March 10th, 4 days before writing that first quiz, I stopped commuting into New York City. I’m over 60 and I wanted to be cautious. With my supervisory work on the evening shift, it was not unusual for me to work from home so it was easy and made sense to start doing it.

Looking back, it felt like a one-day decision, but now it’s clear that it was the before--and this is my after. I’ve not been back into the office or into NYC since--and going back now seems months away (if that). The first “stay-at-home” order hit the news on Monday, March 16th from San Francisco. They first called it a “shelter in place” order--a phrase other officials soon wisely moved away from because of the negative images of an active shooter conjured up by the words “shelter in place.” I wrote about that odd choice of phrase in Quiz #5, “Shelter in Place” on March 18th.

When I first started writing this quiz, I had no idea what I was going to do with it. I used Google forms to write each quiz. I emailed out a link to the quiz to a handful of family and friends. I set it up as a quiz within Google so that if you filled out the form, you got an instant email from Google letting know if you were right (or wrong) in picking out that one thing that did not happen. Like the novelty of Zoom get-togethers, a bunch of people enthusiastically filled out the form in those early days, their responses gathered on a sheet within Google. The flow of responses lasted about a week--and now, more than a month later, it’s only one or two people who fill out the form.

And yet, as the pandemic has intensified, so did my writing. The quizzes became longer and my attempts to make sense of all of this may have revealed more about me than the world itself. The “What did NOT happen?” quiz question often became an afterthought. Again, responses to the quiz dropped off. Maybe it’s that people got tired of me? Maybe they had coronavirus fatigue? Maybe they simply didn’t have the bandwidth left to fill out a form?

And yet again, I have kept writing. For me, writing this quiz has become part of my coronavirus routine. Wake up, take notes, drink coffee with Sara and go to my office/guest room to write until noon when Sara and I have lunch together. Writing keeps me occupied and out of Sara’s hair as she works from home from the kitchen, working a more standard 9-5 schedule than my own evening work. By 1PM, I’m up and ready for work--my mind diverted. Writing the quiz has also been my own form of therapy. In between my confessions, observations and ramblings, I can’t help but feeling that I have something to say.

So today, I am switching formats. The quiz will now come to you as a daily email newsletter from Substack. I will try to send it out overnight so it will be waiting for you in the morning.

If you like it, please share it with your family and friends as you see fit. If you don’t like it, hit “Unsubscribe.”

The “What did NOT happen?” question remains, but there’s no longer a Google form. If you want to know the answer--and I am hoping you will--you have to read the next day’s quiz. At the bottom of each quiz, I will reveal the answer from the day before. I’ve also uploaded all the old quizzes to Substack, 30 in all. Each one has a link to the next day and the answer from the day before so you can catch up on anything you missed--and find out what did NOT happen as well as what DID. Again, you’re welcome to read and encouraged to share with anyone who you think might want to read these meandering musings. I’m just trying to make sense of my world--and I hope my quiz helps you make sense of yours..

All of which brings me back to that broken chair in the middle of our kitchen. We first put it in the kitchen for Stella, our dog who was recovering from ACL surgery that she had on January 30th. She needed to be socially isolated from the other dogs for 8 weeks. We isolated her in the kitchen, keeping the other dogs out with a gate between the kitchen and dining room. At first, the broken chair became Stella’s throne--a low-to-the-ground seat for her as she rehabbed her knee. It soon became a place for us to sit if we wanted to be near her as she lay healing on her dog bed (with someone else in the other room with Happy, the other dog).

Stella’s now out of social isolation. We’re rehabbing her knee with longer walks every day, and yet the chair remains. Our own strange kitchen island in the middle of an upside-down world. John and Will are now with Sara and me in quarantine so there are now 4 adults and only 3 stools at the breakfast bar where we eat most of our meals. Often one of us now eats dinner from that broken chair on the kitchen floor. During the day, Sara also sets up her office on the breakfast bar so she can look out the window at our backyard. She says it’s like working in the break room as John, Will and I are often in and out during the day for coffee, a drink or snack. We sometimes sit in the chair as we take a break with Sara.

Again, it's the new normal. And yet, the “new normal” is actually a phrase that’s annoyed me as I have heard it spoken more and more in the national debate on how to reopen the economy—a conversation that flared up at the start of this week, Easter and the not-completetly-flattened curves of death somehow psychologically behind us.

And so it was that on Friday, April 17th--the day when I began the process of uploading the old quizzes to my Archive on Substack, getting ready to send this quiz out in newsletter form for the first time--that I stumbled onto a great article featured on not one but two of the several newsletters that I read every morning: CNN’s Reliable Sources from Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy and Byers Market from NBC News and Dylan Byers. (Disclosure: I work for NBC News.) Both newsletters featured an article from The Atlantic by Juliette Kayyem, “After Social Distancing, a Strange Purgatory Awaits.” The former Homeland Security official wrote about all the ways, large and small, that life is about to change.

Over the past week, I’ve been informally contacting friends and colleagues in a variety of fields—sports, travel, architecture, entertainment, arts, the clergy, and more—to ask them how their world might look after social distancing. The answer: It looks weird.

It’s a great read and the list of the many things that will change is thought-provoking. She lists how governments, employers and institutions will each act slowly to reopen things within their domain. As we consider taking steps outside our stay-at-home world, one of Kayyem’s key observations is that changes will come not just from the orders, practices and policies of institutions and others—the changes will come from each of us. Yes, you may be required to wear a mask to walk down the sidewalk of the city where you live, but Kayyem also focuses on the individual calculus that each of us will have to make at every step of the way. Drinks with friends? Where? How many? How far apart?

She also closes with a turn of phrase on the “new normal,” borrowed from a friend of hers.

My friend Jonathan Walton, the dean of Wake Forest University’s School of Divinity, has described our time hiding from, mobilizing against, and then living with the virus as the “now normal,” the simple effort to live each day as if it were typical, knowing that the next day will bring a new round of uncertainty. Our reentry will be slow. There could be another wave. Adaptive recovery is going to last a very long time—and it will not feel normal at all.

A broken chair in the middle of the kitchen does not feel normal.

A daily quiz on a global pandemic does not feel normal.

“It looks weird.”

A. Stella still needs to take daily pills because of her surgery. Sara gives the pills to Stella inside a small peanut butter sandwich she makes every morning ;
B. Sara makes 2 sandwiches, one for Stella and one for Happy. Stella eats hers right away;
C. Happy brings her peanut butter into the living room;
D. Happy likes to savor her sandwich and likes to lick the peanut butter around the edges after putting it on the living room sofa. (The sofa’s become an extra bed--and now snack table for the dogs. There’s a lot that’s not normal when you have dogs.);
E. Because we’re running low on peanut butter, Sara’s begun switching things up, using jelly and occasional oatmeal to trick the dogs into eating their pills each morning.

Want the answer?

Answer #31. “This is weird.” April 19, 2020

If you’re a subscriber, the answer will be sent to you as a separate email when the question is published.

Want more?

Here’s the next quiz in the series: Quiz # 32. Jukebox.

Here’s the previous quiz in the series: Quiz #30. “Slugger.”

Here’s the first quiz in the series: Quiz #1. Stella and Social Distancing, March 13, 2020

Here is an archive of all the quizzes.

The quiz is explained here: Steve’s Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz.

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Steve’s Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz