Possibilities

I used to think that I had been born several generations too late. I thought it would have been great to have lived in pioneer times and explored the frontier. It would have been hard work, but I knew how to do most of the tasks that were required. I could sew and cook and garden and churn butter and wash clothes. I liked the outdoors and loved to watch the critters. I could shoot a gun or hoe corn or chop kindling.

Then after losing my first child, I realized that I would most likely have died in childbirth if I had been born in the 1800s. When I went to college, I was the first girl on either side of my family to get a degree. I had one uncle who had gone to school after the Korean War on the G.I. Bill. There was no expectation for me to become any sort of a professional and when I completed my degree, I didn’t have any plans or dreams. I had just fallen into the process. Most women of my generation who had careers were nurses or teachers. I got a teaching certificate as a hedge, but I taught only one year. The rest of my working life was spent as office staff. I followed in the footsteps of my mom who went to secretarial school before she married and raised a family.

All the while I was growing up no one asked me what I wanted to be or suggested that I might pursue a career other than wife and mother. No one had expectations of me and I had none for myself. Unlike my son who probably always assumed he would go to college people of my generation, especially girls had no such assumptions.

Now girls have choices, boys, too. There are a multitude of career paths that are available which didn’t exist in the 1960s. If I were starting college now, I might choose to major in meteorology or some other scientific field. I like science, but during my high school and college years the possibility of pursuing a career just never occurred to me. The standing joke when I went to college was that we girls were there to get our Mrs. Degree and most of us did just that and nothing more. I roomed with the first female Mechanical Engineering student to graduate from my school. She was one of a kind in many respects. She was the only girl in the class. She was smart, but she was abrasive. She expected to be treated with disdain and often was.

My niece is working on an advanced degree in geology. I doubt that she’s ever had to deal with the condescending attitudes of the 60s. A lot has changed in the past sixty years. There are female CEOs of tech companies now and female professional athletes. There are more opportunities, but there is still unequal pay for equal work in many fields. However more girls feel safe pursuing fields that interest them instead of doing what is expected because that’s the way it’s always been. The future is less self-limiting now because more women have stepped out in the direction that their talents lead them and paved the way for others to follow.  Maybe I was just born, too, soon.

Corona Chronicles part 1

The world is topsy turvy. Since the beginning of March 2020, all hell has literally broken loose. It started in China and we heard that they had shut down Wuhan Province because of an epidemic of flu. We didn’t worry about it until there was an outbreak in Iran and then in Italy and Spain and France and Washington State.

All non-essential meetings have ceased except for on-line contact. We are wearing face masks and standing the requisite six feet from everyone when we go to the grocery. I made two masks for each of us, but Gary is the only one who is shopping. I’ve gone out only to the church where I am only around a few others also wearing masks and keeping our distance and to my friend’s porch where three of us meet (and sit with our lawn chairs widely space) for lunch once a week.

Churches, concerts and sports events are all cancelled. Restaurants and bars are closed except for take-out. Very few people are on the roads. Air pollution in the big cities has dropped to the level of ancient times. Lots more people are walking around the neighborhood, but keeping their distance and waving to others without coming in close contact. The food banks are swamped because most service industry workers have been laid off or lost their jobs. The IRS is sending stimulus checks of $1,200 to each adult and families are receiving $500 per child unless of course you are undocumented or have a contract type job and don’t qualify. Millions have applied for unemployment compensation and businesses have applied for Small Business Administration grants to pay for some of their operating costs. The airlines are basically grounded with only a few flights each day.

Closer to home my granddaughter was to start training as a flight attendant in late March. Her class was cancelled because the airline is furloughing its current employees and not taking on any new ones for the foreseeable future. Everyone who can is working from home on-line. Schools are closed for the remainder of the school year. Graduates are graduating without “walking.” Classes are being held on-line for some courses, but many students don’t have the ability to participate on-line. Teachers are contacting their classes by Facebook and Zoom. Playgrounds and movie theaters, museums and swimming pools are closed. Only golf courses currently remain open. Our bowling league ended a month early and the bowling center closed.

We have weeded the yard and played endless games of FreeCell, worked a few puzzles and read books, but don’t have nearly enough books to read or ambition to read the ones I have on the shelf. The Library is closed. Any sort of game requiring more players than members of your immediate family is out. People are painting and roofing and doing yard maintenance. We are waiting. We are waiting for the spread of infection to be over and waiting for life as we know it to begin again. Right now that looks like a very distant possibility. It hardly seems prudent to buy anything new because the likelihood of getting to use a new winter jacket seems iffy. If I get the virus, most probably I will die because I have the dreaded “pre-existing” conditions of old age and chronic lung disease.

This virus apparently attacks the lungs and prevents them from expanding to breathe. The most serious cases have been on ventilators for several weeks before they recover and the odds for recovering if you’re sick enough to require intubation are less than 50%. Most of those who do recover have had a less serious case. Some people are evidently totally unaware that they have even had the virus which complicates quarantining them because they don’t realize they are contagious.

The scientific community worldwide is burning the midnight oil to develop testing and vaccines.  The Chinese mapped the virus genome and published it. There are many approaches being studied for slowing and preventing the spread, but their safety and effectiveness will not be known for months yet. Perhaps in a year we will have a vaccine to immunize the population, but unchecked the number of persons killed by the virus could reach levels similar to the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic of over 50,000,000 deaths worldwide. Thus far the epidemic has not spread widely in third world countries, but sooner or later it will get there.

So far there have only been a few “known” cases in Gila County. We don’t know how many “asymptomatic” cases there are. Nationwide there have currently been over 32,000 deaths in the U.S. and 154,000 worldwide. Nursing homes seem to be hit the hardest, but young people have died, too. People are getting restless because the quarantine seems endless and families are running out of money for rent and food. The planning for tackling this threat was piece meal and uncoordinated. There is no general consensus of how to deal with it except by social distancing and that approach is going to spread the timeline for returning to normal over months. New York City has been the hardest hit area to date. The peak infection rate will roll across the country hitting some states much later than others, but it seems that there is no way to escape totally because none of us humans has natural immunity to this new virus. We’re waiting it out.