Quarantine Story

The COVID-19 quarantine has me thinking about a smaller scale sheltering-in that I experienced in the fall of 1972. Much smaller. One household. The household I happened to be a member of. It lasted a week and the four of us kids were stuck inside with each other. The reason? My younger brother had been diagnosed with a possible case of scarlet fever. He had a rash and an elevated temperature, but this being nearly fifty years ago, the lab test to verify the diagnosis would take nearly a week to be completed. So we were quarantined. My mother was allowed to go to work at the law firm where she was a legal assistant because that wasn't considered an enormous risk. Scarlet fever is most dangerous for and most contagious among those between the ages of five and fifteen, and three of the four of us kids were in that hot zone. Spreading the infection in school would have been a very bad thing. I was a sophomore in high school at the time and was never so happy to have my own room as during this lockdown. It was a welcome escape from my siblings and I do remember sleeping late after reading late into the night. We all had our assignments from school and all of our various textbooks and workbooks were delivered to our door. My memories of that week are a bit sketchy, mostly I remember reading to my little brother and placing a cool washcloth on his forehead to make him more comfortable. I also remember helping my little sis with some of her schoolwork. For the most part I managed to keep up in all of my classes with the exception of one. It didn't seem to matter how much time and effort I had put into learning vocabulary and practicing my accent during that week, when I was thrust back into German I class my brain completely froze up. I don't remember my teacher's name, only that he was small in stature and wore large glasses. He would stroll up and down the aisles between the desks and randomly address students, asking questions in German and expecting us to respond in kind. I expect I had something of a deer-in-the-headlights expression on my face when he stopped next to me and asked, "Wie geht es dir?", and I responded feebly "Montag?"I ended up dropping first year German, which was very disappointing for me. In the end it was determined that my brother did not have scarlet fever and life pretty much returned to normal. Into the sixth week of the coronavirus shutdown, I have to say it's been tolerable, though weird. I have lots of projects to work on around the house and still go for walks when the weather cooperates. We can still have a pizza and movie night and I have been cooking and baking more than I normally do. I have had to be more organized about shopping and have done a pretty good job of managing to grocery shop every two weeks to limit my exposure. I am grateful that I have a comfortable home to shelter in with many electronic distractions available. As a retired person, being absent from work is not an issue for me. But my retirement accounts have taken a beating with the tanking of the stock market. I can't predict what the fallout from this pandemic will be, I'm just one person whose experience with it will be a mixed bag of blessings and shortfalls. Privilege in this country has never been so obvious. We're all in this together, but some of us are in leaky rowboats and some of us are on private luxury yachts.