January 6, 2021
Beep Beep Beep WHISTLE!!!
Through the miniscule window on my iPhone, my trainer Danny’s interval timer beeps and whistles, tinny through the Zoom app. I put my hands behind my head and do 45 seconds of V-ups. My abs are screaming. The timer ding-ding-dings! at the end of the interval and I lay down my head. In the background of the Zoom screen of my fellow exerciser, I hear news anchors read astounding words from their teleprompters. “Insurrectionists have stormed the Capitol building today, waving Trump flags, while Vice President Mike Pence has been removed from the building and taken to safety.”
“A woman has been shot in the chest on the Capitol grounds” says Anderson Cooper, while I pass a 4 lb medicine ball over and under my knees. My phone dings a text message, and the preview screen pops up momentarily over the zoom. The text from one of my best friends reads: “They took my dad off oxygen, we’re on our way to the hospital to say good-bye.” It’s a group text, and while I do 10 reps of alternating side planks, condolences from the various members of the text group pop up every 10 seconds or so. I will later learn from Facebook that since he died of COVID, due to hospital protocol only three people could be by his bedside. My friend yielded her potential spot at his side to her younger brother, older sister, and her mom. I do ten miserable, grueling burpees while she stands alone outside the hospital watching the sun set, and as her father slips into death.
While my trainer starts the interval for side toe-touches, I mute my Zoom and step out of view briefly to holler at my children, who are back on virtual learning and have been home all day bickering. They have asked me possibly five hundred times for a snack today. I do not know if they have finished every assignment in their Google Classrooms, because I have been busy today fighting opposing counsel and a very rude, petty government agent who speaks to me like I am a child. The thought of wading through fifty links in their various Google Classrooms makes me feel faint, so I will just leave it for today.
We are stretching now, Danny modeling our various moves from my six inch iPhone screen. I do fifteen cat-cows, while my spouse texts me the grocery list from his isolation in the master bedroom. He tested positive for Covid a week ago, but we are pretty sure it was a false positive. The test indicated it had something wrong with it, and he immediately re-tested and was negative. All three boys and I tested and are negative. Nobody feels remotely sick at all, and we have not been in contact with any Covid positive person. Nevertheless, we are being cautious, isolating him off in the master bedroom and quarantining the rest of us. I serve him his meals on a tray. Every night at 5:30 I rap my knuckles on the door and leave a bourbon on ice.
After I finish my stretches, Danny sets up our next meeting time. He has more time now for Zoom sessions, as New Orleans announced today that we are reverting back to Phase 1 and Danny’s gym work has been curtailed. He’s worried about making ends meet – his wife is a trainer too. It’s been a bad year for them. Danny’s mother died of Covid earlier this year. Ironically they probably would be in worse shape financially right now, if not for that small inheritance.
It is now 5:47. I have to make dinner. The Prof will vacate our room briefly so I can fetch some more clothes and my shampoo. I snatched some pjs and clean undies at the beginning of his isolation, but did not grab my toiletries. I’ve been using Craig’s tear free baby soap and Jack’s tween deodorant – I smell like Axe body spray, but luckily I go ever more nowhere than my usual nowhere. So who cares.
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Today is Epiphany, the day the magi beheld the baby. As St. Augustine said imagining beholding the creche, “Truth, by which the world is held together, has sprung from the earth, in order to be carried in a woman’s arms.”
My arms are getting stronger by the minute.