4/3/2020
A beautiful early spring day and I’ve spent a restless couple nights with a lowgrade fever and the incumbent aches and pains of fever. My wife got her test results back this morning and she’s positive. Two nights of fevers—I don’t believe in coincidences. Our PCP practice told her that there’s no need to test me. How will we ever begin to track this with anything resembling scientific certainty? I don’t listen to the president. All of his most idiotic inclinations seem to be at the fore. If there’s a stupid, evil or selfish way to look at this, that’s his route.
Meanwhile the Cuomo brothers seem to have cornered the market on sense, empathy and humor.
“Scandinavian Minnesotans: 6 feet? That close? “
That’s my favorite social distancing meme from a Minnesota friend:
We are both doing okay–mild symptoms. I’m respecting my HCP wife’s request for privacy. She’ll tell her own story if and when she wants to. But I do want to thank those who’ve reached out for your expressions of love and support.
I have plenty of reading and writing to do. I am easily amused and hard to bore (unless you count watching the Swiss Family Trump hog the airwaves–very low tolerance for any of them).
I burned through a wonderful book by Temple U prof Liz More, called “Long Bright River,” a sort of hopeful love story to the notorious Kensington section of PHL. Thanks Charlotte for the recommendation. I just started reading Johnson and Moses biographer Robert Caro book “Working” for inspiration. If I still have time, I’ll tackle his 7000 page LBJ masterwork.
PS: When I posted this on Facebook, I got 158 comments. That’s a personal best.
People who care about us are calling all the time. Most of my phone calls these days are 5 minutes or less. Then I have to curl into a ball and pull a pillow over my head. The nausea is constant. The night fevers are as predictable as Trump is stupid. I search for words and can’t find the right ones. I repeat myself and stammer. Use inappropriate adjectives. I feel like the Covidiot in Chief.
Still I had a great WhatsApp chat with my one-time writing partner from Bombay. I got to meet his pretty 10-year-old daughter who was playing shyly at his feet. After we met in Rockport at a scriptwriting workshop, we collaborated on a romcom called “Perfect Worlds” from an idea he’d been kicking around. The story bloomed into a tale of a scrappy, handsome Indian boy who wanted nothing more to come to the US to make his fortune He meets a wounded American girl who wants nothing more than to put down roots in India and escape her dark past in America. Sparks ensue. For three-almost four years, we fleshed it out via email and Skype calls and got something polished enough to submit it to the Sundance New Filmmakers Lab. Our entry made the first cut.
My friend, his daughter and wife are a lot like our family – middle class, struggling to make ends meet but mostly doing so. We’re both urbanites though his city is almost exactly 10 times more populous than mine. He and I both do corporate video. Still I think their lives are very different. We have Trump and they have Modi. They are battling poverty and religious intolerance against Muslims and other minorities. So are we. They are enduring lockdown and we are too. Maybe not so different after all.
Our first meeting was an improbably face-to-face connection turned into a bond of writer/brothers. We stayed connected through the screenplay we worked on through the years when the Internet first came online, through email and Skype and now Facebook. I’ve never had a better collaborator than him.
Stay safe you all. Yours, R
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