At the time I saw it all unfolding from inside a hospital.
Late February, my grandpa had a stroke. At 89 this made his only hospital stay in his life. While news here was gradually getting more and more serious me, my dad, and his 2 sisters were just focused on pa. When we were going to sit with him, what he was having done that day, how he's handling it, and what his recovery process might look like. During our visits we gradually saw more and more posters about hand washing. Signs about wearing a mask if you're sick. Hand sanitizer on every corner. He had the operation to clean out the artery that had caused the stroke a couple of weeks before lockdown. When we finally got out of our own heads and realized that the virus thing we had barely heard about was serious was when we needed special permission to see him afterwards and we weren't allowed to touch him. I'll admit, we all held his hands. He was tired, a little anxious about being cooped up for so long, and it looked like we might not be able to visit when they got stricter. He had just gotten a debit card the year before and that level of technology annoyed him (I took him and one aunt grocery shopping once a week up until then, and I "had a talk" with the machine for him most of the time. I sorta had just looked over his shoulder for his pin when I realized he had trouble putting it in sometimes). The monitoring equipment in that pace was wild looking and creeped all of us out. One aunt is a former nurse (the other worked in records for the same hospital system) and both ran into friends there that said shit looked bad. One of them was shaking when she talked about it.
I've spent the last year basically as I always have, but I don't go to thrift stores right now. I miss them so much. I had a routine of going with my dad for his guitar lessons on Friday, and then getting all of our errands done. Pawn shop, book store, recycling, walmart, lowes, thrift store, and then food lion. Now I grab pickup orders, and the book store is closed. As far as my real "job" every place I have art at right now is an antimasker, even the one I thought was cool and smart. My workshop is close to fixed but I'm in no hurry to expand because I know it's just going to be more of the same.
Now I'm fighting to get vaccinated so we can worry less about pa. He's doing great now and I'm his only caregiver not in a group that's allowed the vaccine here (Dad is a patient through a hospital network that's doing it, aunts are over 65). To be a caregiver by their rules you have to be on a payroll. Grandpa slipping you a $20 as a "business investment" when you come to clean every week or fill in for someone else's shift isn't quite employment. We are having a hard time convincing him to get it just because he's worried about getting both doses. Luckily it looks like they straightened that out here, and we have his doctor in the loop. If his doc says it's time to get it he won't question it. I'm calling it part brain fog, part being a contrary old man, and part a family tradition of being difficult about everything.
