Living in coronavirusworld 186: Getting dark earlier

10/11

fall comes to the Garden

Thank you health care workers

Medical care in coronavirusworld is a much more complex reality, especial for older people. My mom had a fall and broken hip at her assisted care facility and is now at the Pennsylvania U Medical Center at Princeton. I’ve come to visit her via New Jersey Transit and Uber. Gone through the obligatory temperature check and paper work to come in and visit her. On the way up, I check a historic display and see that the first iteration of this hospital came when a private estate was given to the community during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. 

My mom’s recovery is as expected. What’s  newer will be rehab and that’s where the virus has its way. She will need to be quarantined for 14 days. For me, not so bad. For someone in their nineties, a different proposition. It's been had enough in a first class hospital maintaining a grip on reality with regular visits from family members. These visits break through the fog of  lingering anesthesia and then pain killer hallucinations. To be somewhere you’ve never been locked in a room and with no contact with anyone you know from the outside, it’s extremely  dangerous. Something about  this just doesn’t seem to make sense.  They don't weigh the mental health cost.

I listen in to my family’s weekly ZOOM conversation on the way home. Europe seems to  be in the midst of a spiking second wave. Especially France and the Netherlands. New York City is looking pretty good right now though my son thinks we may have had so many get it and die that there’s no more fertile ground for the virus.

New York City’s Public School’s hybrid in person/remote project is still figuring itself out with teachers having to parse new rules and expectations daily. Especially upsetting while the mayor has tried to cancel mandated back pay settlements to teachers. An arbitrator rules that instead of the expected lump sum payouts there will be two payouts six months apart.

the cat is back

in the garden

the cardinal

The feral cat is back in Morningside. My egret has left for the winter. Maybe as far as the West Indies, they say. She tells me the little ducks from further north are  expected at the Central Park Reservoir soon. Fall has come to the Conservatory Gardens. But what flowers remain are more striking in their persistent beauty. A cafe red cardinal makes its appearance. It’s getting darker earlier.