Tag: family

David reports that at the Northvale Shop Rite, they were only allowing fifty customers in at a time and, after eyeing the length, he and his friend drove to Stop & Shop, where there was no line. He lives near the state line between New York and New Jersey, and basically Shop Rite is in New Jersey and Stop & Shop is in New York, so whether this is a difference in states or stores, we’re not sure.

I have heard from other people in both states of lines at stores, a similar symptom with a very different cause as often compared to lines in the Soviet Union. There is plenty of food, though some things run out quickly. The challenge is that they want to keep people as far apart as possible.

At the Stop & Shop, aisles were designated one-way; like streets, presumably to help people avoid running into each other with cross traffic. One imagines a lengthy assembly line where the worker moves along the tracks, collecting their required parts for final assembly at home. Everyone wears masks.

Contrast all of this with my own experience in Manhattan. I have long used a grocery delivery service, one that until recently was excellent. They still are, but if you go to their website they basically advise to check delivery availability first, and nothing is available for at least a week.

My local “posh” grocer has had a delivery service for a while, and I’ve used it twice now. They’re not really that posh; they have some fancy things, but the non-fancy things are reasonably priced. The first time I ordered delivery, they delivered to the apartment in the other building, which is an easy mistake to make. Yesterday they dropped off my delivery in the right place, and early to boot.

In both cases though, my orders were missing items because they’re run out. There are methods they use to put in substitutes, but I expect they have their limits.

This leads to my chief conundrum: do I venture outside to seek these items on my own, or forgo them until the next time I need to order groceries?

I generally settle for the latter but two days ago, I realized I’d forgotten to order hummus, and it was too late to add hummus to the order, and I knew I would want hummus, so I put on my coat and shoes and extra layer of pants, and my mask and a scarf and gloves, and I walked up to the Korean bodega, and I bought not only hummus but some produce that the posh story had been empty of, and some chocolate, and some Omega-3 nut mix for snacking on. Oh and I picked up six bottles of wine from the wine store because I like them and want them to stay in business.

If only I’d known then what wouldn’t show up, I’d have gotten that. This leads me to realize I need to be more systematic about my grocery shopping. In the past, if I ran short of anything, my worst case was some inconvenience in having to ugh put on shoes and coat and walk five minutes up the hill, buy that thing, and walk five minutes back down.

Now, to do so means breaking a streak of staying in home. It means following my meager protocol of excursions, summarized more or less as:

1. There is a “dirty” coat that stays near the door and is not hung with other coats.
2. I wear gloves and a mask. A hat or scarf as well to cover my head.
3. I wear shoes that are easy to don and doff.
4. When I return, pants and socks stay in the hot zone.
5. Goods stay in the decontamination zone. Anything that requires refrigeration gets cleaned and stowed within an hour or two, but everything else stays in the hot zone.
6. Eventually items in the hot zone get either 1) washed in soapy water or 2) stowed once whatever material they are has been inside long enough for the virus to no longer be a threat.

It’s exhausting just thinking about it.

On the other hand, I’ve bought and cooked and frozen so much food that I really have run out of room and containers. I may not always be able to have what I want, but I have enough food that if I had to, yeah I could stay inside for two weeks.

And that, thankfully, is more than a lot of people can say. So, no complaints.

I count in my head the number of touches I need to accomplish anything outside of my apartment.

1. the door to the laundry room, coming and going, washing and drying: four.
2. to the grocery store: the two doors for my building, coming and going (4), the basket (1-ish?). Minimizing the handling of goods: five minimum, but not accounting for proximity to people in the aisles.
3. going for a walk: the four for my building door as above, although if I’m lucky I can draft on the doors that use mechanical assistance to stay open longer while still maintaining social distance.
4. to the garage below my building: the breezeway door, the door at the top of the stairwell, the door at the bottom of the stairwell. I debate whether it’s better to touch or hip-bump the first of those, which has a horizontal press-bar to open from the inside. In any case, yikes, that’s six touches just to go to the car.

And so it goes. As of March 20, we’ve not been ordered locked down, or quarantined, or “shelter in place”, in either the Empire State of New York or the great city of New York, but I have essentially been practicing that. I was already working from home before the outbreak occurred, so it’s been easy for me to simply stay inside as much as possible.

That said – when our mayor, who resisted closing public schools and was still going to the gym hours before a ban on that went into effect, said that New Yorkers might want to plan to shelter in place, that was the one moment of true panic I had. What groceries did I have on hand? Would there be a run at the market as nine million people across five boroughs rushed to stock up? Should I get in my car and evacuate to the suburbs, where my significant other has a house?

I decided to stay, mostly on two key assumptions. One is that, despite living in an apartment building in one of the largest cities in the world, I am alone in my apartment, as isolated as a person can get. The other is that, while David and I were planning to spend next week together, which we both have off, it’s not clear whether I’d be able to come back home afterwards, and the nature of his job is such that he is out and around people constantly.

Even at that, the job has changed just in the past couple of days. He works in television news, driving the truck, shooting and editing video, then transmitting it back to the station. They stopped having reporters do “man on the street” interviews, since that inherently breaks social distancing, and recently, he’s not been driving with reporters – alone in a truck.

A shared truck, mind you, though even that appears to be about to change.

This was the hardest decision of all. I was looking forward to a long week with my loved one, neither of us having to go to work, spending time with each other, and maybe getting some work done ’round the house. Even here I counted touches: the keypad on the lock, and visits to the grocery stores there.

It’s clear we’re in a different world now, and it’s one that will continue, in varying degrees, for months to come.