A new mood has overtaken my neighborhood. With the new variant of COVID-19 and the inability of many to obtain a vaccine here, everybody I know is nervous and seems to have become afraid. Residents in my apartment building who used to stop and ask how I was doing, masked and at a social distance, of course, now only nod and keep on walking. My only social contacts occur when I pick up the mail in the lobby. A highlight of my day.
It was disappointing and discouraging the other day when I encountered a woman who has three school-age children. Previously she’d stop and chat—the older kids joining in and laughing at a recent occurrence. This time she was alone. She immediately drew back and said, “We’ll talk another time.”
I have a generous neighbor on my floor whose job it is to verify the freshness and safety of home-delivered groceries. Each week he receives quantities of food—milk, eggs, bread, and cheeses--far too much for him and his wife to use. That day he called asking which items I’d like. In a paying-forward fashion, I give the items I don’t need to a friend, who in turn passes some of her bounty to another person. I do my best to return my neighbor’s kindness by giving him an occasional box of chocolates or a bottle of wine.
Our first weekly exchange involved an in-apartment conversation about not just the food but how each of us came to be living in Manhattan and in the same building. On subsequent visits we talked about what countries we’d visited and good-naturedly argued about what regional cuisines were the best. That day it became a silent affair: door was left ajar, three hard raps, my “thank you”, his “you’re welcome,” and then a firm click as he pulled the door closed.
“Alone again,” I said out loud. Early in the pandemic I was embarrassed to find myself, not just feeling my anxieties, but expressing them vocally. But now, ten long months into the pandemic, I’ve become an advocate of that practice. As infants we do our best to encourage “conversations” with our caretakers. The sound of another is key to a human brain’s development, and to sanity, itself, I reason.
During that week New York City had opened Covid-19 vaccinations to all residents over sixty-five. We’re talking about more than 700,000 people in Manhattan who qualify. Unfortunately, I’ve had an anaphylactic attack which heightens my risk numbers and requires me to be vaccinated in a hospital. That afternoon I’d spent hours calling my doctor and searching hospital websites hoping that I’d learn where I might register. The only advice I received was to call the city’s helpline, which circled right back to telling me to call my doctor! I went to bed that night very discouraged.
The next morning I learned that four of my friends, because they had the ability to get the vaccine at large facilities, had been able to get a time-slot for not only the first dose but the second dose as well, whereas I hadn’t even managed to get registered at a hospital. Then I learned that the city’s allotment was running very low: anyone like me who hadn’t already registered might have to wait months until there was sufficient vaccine to be inoculated.
I’d been given two photos as Xmas gifts that I planned to have framed. In an attempt to cheer myself up the next morning, I went to the piano and as I was shifting family photos around to make space for the ones to come, there peeking from behind a photo was a Xmas angel!
For everyone, I assume, unpacking decorations before the holiday season is filled with a sense of anticipation for the approaching days. But packing them up has none of those emotions. For me, it’s just something to get over with. As the years of my married life have continued, the number of these items seems to have grown exponentially. Decorations of colored construction paper made by small hands to be hung on the tree, placed on a table, or placed in the kitchen, ones with a personal message given by friends and colleagues. And I added to these when I began collecting an ornament for each of my sons from every country my husband and I visited. Somewhere along this timeline I resorted to categorizing: boxes for glass balls, boxes for especially fragile items, a box for the stockings and tree skirt, a somewhat battered camping bag to contain wound-up strings of twinkly lights, a small sturdy box for the creche I’d picked up in a French village, and a box full of angels.
For eleven months of the year these boxes reside high on a shelf right next to the ceiling. Getting them down and back up requires a ladder and four pairs of hands. When I say I hate this task, the words fall only slightly short of honesty.
This year because I’d be alone for the holidays, I decorated minimally. Only a few small silver trees, some red bows, and a scattering of angels. Each year I’d vow to locate all of these ornaments on the first try. But always, always after the fragile items were wrapped with tissue paper, the boxes closed, carried, and lifted into place, I’d find one or two more. On the grandfather clock, or in a son’s room, or on a high shelf. Along the way I learned to have not one, but two people, follow me in search of ornaments hidden deep in the tree’s branches. This year because I didn’t have a tree I thought it’d be easy, and I was determined to get them all on the first swoop. How had I missed this one!
I picked the free-standing angel up. Her wings, banded by silver, were of stained-glass, not the typical medieval colors of dark blues and reds and greens, but of pinks. Those medieval artisans labored for years in a painstaking, multi-tasked technique to create those breathtakingly rich colors. In contrast my angel’s handblown glass wings are in hues of soft pink. When I held her up to the light the wings’ colors changed to hues of foxglove, the underside of a magnolia petal, and the faintest hint of anemone purple. Magnificent! These amazing modern colors are achieved by an enameling process that rivals the patience and precision required of those earlier masters. Deviate the fire’s temperature by only a few degrees in the banding-silver-to-glass process, and the glass shatters.
My first reaction upon discovering her had been one of frustration for I’d have to pull out the container of wrapping paper, swath the angel in tissue paper, and then wait—who knows how long?—until my building once again allowed workmen to enter apartments, call down to the front desk, and request a worker to help place it on the high shelf with the other decorations.
But my annoyance melted away as I discovered yet another color. I decided to leave the angel where she is, peeking out between my special-occasion family photos. I’ll leave her in place until I’ve received the second dose of the vaccine, until residents of my building linger to talk again, until my neighbor brings the groceries into my apartment and stays to chat.
I placed the angel back on the piano.
“Now here you go,” I said.