Pandemic Wave
TERRY DALRYMPLE
April 28, 2020
My grandson, three, smiles hugely into the FaceTime screen his mother holds.
“Hey, T-Pa, guess what,” he says.
“What?”
“I made a wrecking ball!”
His mother, bless her heart, has kept him busy in social isolation.
“Cool,” I say.
“Want to see it, T-Pa?”
“I sure do.”
He runs to get it from across the room. In the meantime, his one-year-old sister repeats as she flashes her beautiful smile, “Hi. Hi. Hi.”
“Hi, sweetie,” I say.
Her brother reappears in the frame, standing near a stack of cardboard boxes his mother has dug out of a closet. The wrecking ball is a big rubber ball attached to a string and hanging from the back of his toy excavator. He pulls it back, aims at the boxes, and releases. The boxes go flying.
“Fantastic, buddy,” I say.
“Want me to do it again?”
“I sure do.”
After four more demonstrations, we sign off: “I love you, T-Pa,” he says into his mother’s phone. Behind him, little sister blows a kiss.
* * * * *
A long-time best friend calls to check up. Are we well and staying safe in pandemic
isolation?
We are, I say, and the two of us share stories about teaching online, which we both hate but are making work.
He tells me about a new gumbo recipe he has tried. We both agree that at the very least gumbo must include shrimp and okra. I tell him about making radish greens pesto from my home-grown radishes and using it on fried cod. We compare our ways of coping, working online until we can’t stand it, then moving around a bit, he lifting weights and walking, me digging, planting, hoeing, and watering gardens. We talk about entertaining TV series we’ve watched. We talk about favorite music.
* * * * *
I text a friend from long ago, a high school friend I’ve seen or at least spoken to maybe six times since the 1970s. “Hope you and yours are alive and well,” I say. Half an hour later, he texts, “Yes, thanks. I remarried a couple months ago.” I didn’t know he’d divorced. “We bought a new house in Austin,” he continues, “and getting it in shape keeps us out of harm’s way.”
I congratulate him, tell him my wife, whom he also knew in high school, and I are faring well. We exchange some memories of long-ago days, things we did that we shouldn’t have, things we didn’t do that we should have. I laugh. A lot. And I feel certain he’s laughing, too.
* * * * *
In the grocery store parking lot, I pull into a slot reserved for curbside pick-up. The day is warm, so I roll down my window. In the car next to me, a tattooed young man and his tattooed wife or girlfriend nod at me. I nod back.
“Gotta love this curbside service,” I say.
“For sure,” tattoo man says. “You doing good?”
“So far. You, too?”
“Never better,” the woman replies, then giggles briefly.
My groceries come. Their groceries come. After our business is done, we start our vehicles. We nod at each other again, smile, wave.
TERRY DALRYMPLE writes fiction and teaches literature and writing at Angelo State University in San Angelo, TX. He enjoys photography and gardening, both of which provide excellent therapy during these times of social distancing and isolation.
