Dispatching My Sharona
3/14/2020 — West Village, Manhattan
3/14/2020 — West Village, Manhattan
I’m tempted to give this dispatch a more accurate title, but the scientific term has been mentioned so frequently in chirons and click bait that I’m tempted to lean into a louche snobbery and say THAT NAME has become cliché. What do I really know about the song My Sharona? About as much as I do about pathogenesis. Let’s agree it’s a schlocky cultural artifact from 1979, which I hope isn’t correlated to your author, born 1973. It just seems funny as a journal name for these unfunny times.
Are there now, at this very second, millions of TikTok, um, widely popular videos, mocking this rhyming confluence of song and disease? Do teenagers over index on irreverence?
Today. The first day of Dispatching My Sharona. Saturday March 14th 2020. Shabbat. I woke early at 6:50am. Checked in with my friend Andrew Rodgers up in Carlisle, Massachusetts where he manages Clark Farm, an organic CSA that feeds over a thousand people in his community northwest of Boston. We tend to talk every few days. We’ve been close friends since the late 1970s. (Ideally this is a last reference to my pre-millennial age.) Andrew and I have been in contact at least once a day over the past week. Over the past two days it’s been every few hours.
The theme of our talk: Escape from New York. Drive the roughly 200 miles to his farm and also be closer to my boomer mom and slightly older step-father in Newton, MA. I can live the agronomic dream while delivering my folks palettes of sardines and cruditeés, or whatever it takes to survive this crisis.
I’m still thinking about Andrew’s offer. It’s tempting to work alongside my closest friend, out in the fresh air. Garlic is already rising through the topsoil. I can capably drive a tractor. Why is it worth staying in Manhattan that’s slowly denuded of its venues and restaurants, it’s gatherings and dinner parties?
After drinking coffee and panic-reading the New York Times, the New York Magazine, The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Post — I’m kidding about the last three — I headed to my gym to bike the pain away. I go to a single-floor facility that’s relatively impoverished compared to the $200-a-month edifices of chiseled income inequality and tight butts now proliferating coastal America. They’re like tough jocks on the beach, kicking sand on pale, hollow-chested nerds who think Peloton is a type of cheese. My nebbishy gym was moderately active, not as crowded as a typical Saturday morning but busy. The man biking next to me looked to be in his 60s. He wore purple plastic gloves.
While going nowhere fast I texted people in the New York area. It was a small sample size of six or seven friends. 100% of them were hunkering down and not open to meeting up for any plans. Later in the day my friend in Westchester called it self-isolating. Not quarantine, that’s if you’ve been knowingly exposed — unless you’re the president, then it’s fine to risk your friends and family with a ruthless pathogen. (Update: he’s malevolent. I mean, negative.) It’s a form of pretty extreme isolation. Go outside for quick shopping trips for necessities, then head right back home. Nothing social. No school or daycare for the kids. I joked with my Westchester friend who has a big yard that it’s the perfect time to get a dairy goat and chicken. Another friend in New Jersey said she’s now cultivating a vegetable garden. We’re all going agricultural, minus the camaraderie of field work.
As I kept texting more self-isolaters, the circumference of my wide social circle shrank to a pinkie ring, and then finally, to a hard little dot of one. I would soon go home and vacuum. Although my home is spotless. I would cook chicken stock. Although I already have stew in the freezer. Maybe I would look up AirBNBs in Carlisle, Massachusetts and have a beer. I’m out of beer.
Alone again for an entire day. Then a friend in Hudson Yards agreed to meet for a picnic along the Hudson River. Human contact! For maybe two hours!
I went home to shower. It was a cloudless, bright day. If there were crocuses along 7th Avenue South, they would be inching into trumpets. Couples wearing clothes that look like smartly tailored pajamas confidently strolled the West Village streets. Dogs stared at their owners, and then at me, while peeing on someone’s building. A lady lost in her phone almost walked into traffic. Business as usual.
Sandwich shops, mom & pop restaurants, bodegas, liquor stores, bars. Open open open. Was anything happening? Did Jane Jacobs smile at us from her cozy, community-focused spot in heaven? If I ignored my phone, I’d have to say no, yes.
Soon my sweet friend Sabrina and I met in a park along the river bank to enjoy nuts, fruit and white wine smuggled in a water bottle.
If we were a New Yorker cartoon, you’d see a medium-shot of two people on a bench with both of their word bubbles uttering the words:
“Virus, virus, virus?”
“Virus! Virus virus. Virus.”
We made little piles of the snacks so we didn’t touch each other’s food. She wore plastic gloves. At one point I coughed into a napkin to clear my throat. There was a pause in the conversation.
A small group of musicians in their late 20s materialized on a bench nearby. They were Asian and looked inspired by an America of maybe ten or twenty years ago. One man wore a knit blazer and oxblood leather shoes. Another had a wool hat despite the solar gaze. Another guy with a GoPro camera and boom mic filmed them. They sang romantic folk songs in English, with a guitar and clarinet. Then there was a flute. A young woman in their entourage watched and danced without moving her feet.
When they finished we all clapped.
“You guys are wonderful. That was beautiful. Where are you from?” I asked.
“Taiwan!”
“Can you go back?”
“Yes,” they laughed. “We’re going back. Thank you.”
After planning for the past three days to pack my car with beef jerky and drive north until Andrew taught me soil nutrition 101, I remembered again why I moved to Manhattan twenty years ago. You don’t need Broadway or a personal calendar stuffed with events. It’s the accidental culture that makes New York home. Just go outside and listen.