Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Bye-bye Apple Pie.

The restaurants and bars are observing the first day of being closed to dine-in and drink-in patrons.  You can still get your favorite dish from most restaurants and scurry home and wash your hands for ten minutes, singing “Southside Irish” to yourself,  but the days of dropping in on your favorite tavern, sitting at the bar, and having a drink while you wait for your meal are over for a few weeks.  And as far as I know, there are no bars with a curbside pick-up of Jamison.

The not-so-surprising surprise, I fear,  is that restaurants and bars are going to be closed for a few months, at least, based on what is happening in France and Spain and Italy and China.  I hope I’m wrong and that some compromise of social distancing can be reached or there is going to be a restaurant desert everywhere.

Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, announced the first death in Illinois, a Chicago woman in her 60’s with “underlying conditions”.  How long will it be before we just get the numbers and no qualifiers as to health?  I’d say about five days from now.

I took two walks today, one early in the morning and one after I finished what work I could while working from home.  I work in travel and tourism, so my clients — travel agents– are slammed right now trying to rebook clients and assure them that Covid-19 will end the world will still be here and they will need a break after all this.  They don’t have time to talk to me.

In an earlier post, I had conceived the idea of walking in cemeteries to avoid living people, but I’m waiting to put that plan into effect, so I found a deserted trail in the forest preserves, all the while watching my gas needle go to E and wondering how soon it will be before I have no work and no money.  The second walk was at a park, which was virtually empty, but I walked the parameter of it anyway.  Social distancing to the extreme.   I could look in the distance and see a hospital.  I wondered about the storm that is soon to hit there.

Meanwhile, President Trump promised to have a check in the mail to me for one thousand dollars.  He might as well keep it.  Save the postage.  When I file my taxes it’s going right back to him.  I’ll look for it in the mail, delivered by a now gloved postal lady.  My mail has been in my box for a week now.

It feels like September 11 every day.  The shocks keep coming, the news changes every hour.  The various Death-O-Meters click off the infected, the sick, and the dead.

We wait for the invisible enemy.  Not to bomb us or crash airplanes into buildings, but to invade and terrorize our most sacred possession, our bodies.