We were standing in line at the ferry dock in Provincetown, Mass., on a glorious, crystalline day last summer that made saying goodbye a bit harder than usual.
“End of an era,” said my daughter Emma, bound home to Brooklyn after our annual summer stay in a rented house on the Outer Cape.
I agreed.
Joey Himelfarb estimates that in his 25 years in sales, hawking everything from Hewlett-Packard computers to cars and swimming pools, he has been laid off or downsized at least a half-dozen times.
The most recent occasion came in April, when he got a call from the chief executive officer of the start-up in northern Virginia that had hired him 10 months earlier. The company sells systems that extract data from video. Mr. Himelfarb worked remotely from his apartment in Belle Mead, N.J. “I was working my tail off,” he said. “We were busy.”
But now, the boss told him, because of the coronavirus pandemic, the company could no longer afford his mid-five-figure salary.
Come January, there may be many more people like Mary Prochaska.
Ms. Prochaska, 73, a retired social worker in Chapel Hill, N.C., has advanced chronic kidney disease and relies on dialysis to filter waste from her blood while she awaits a kidney transplant, her second. But she no longer visits a dialysis center three times a week, the standard treatment. There, nurses and technicians monitored her for four hours while a machine cleansed her blood.
Instead, she has opted for dialysis at home. “It’s easier on your body and better for your health,” she said. “And far better than exposing yourself to whatever you might get from being in a group of people” at a center during a pandemic.
Preparing for my granddaughter’s first solo sleepover at my apartment bore a certain resemblance to welcoming a head of state or some other V.I.P.
At the supermarket, I laid in provisions: the breakfast cereal she liked, cocoa for hot chocolate on a cold afternoon, ingredients for baking projects. I’d been buying secondhand books and toys for a while, but now I ordered additional art supplies and a simple board game.
What else could help occupy a 4-year-old over 24 hours? Bulbs! We could plant daffodils in the still-soft dirt outside the front door and watch them produce flowers next spring. I drove to a garden center.
On my first British morning, a dank one like all that followed, I took the tube to Leicester Square and walked up Charing Cross Road. It was surprisingly quiet, the rush hour over and the musty bookstores along Charing Cross not yet open for business.
In five minutes, less, I reached Cambridge Circus, one of those disorienting agglomerations where several London thoroughfares converge and then meander off again. And there it was on the right between Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue, a sturdy-looking Edwardian edifice, red brick garnished with beaded stonework.
Naturally, no sign or nameplate identified the place. The Circus is so sensitive a location, its creator has written, that its occupants never allow their taxis to pull up at the entrance. They disembark in front of the ornate theater across the street instead, or at Foyle’s bookstore a block north. But I had spent weeks reading and taking notes and poring over detailed street maps. I had also, after a series of transatlantic and domestic faxes resulting in a phone call at a certain time on a certain day, consulted with John le Carre.
When my granddaughter was born, my own role was very clear: Keep a packed bag handy. Head for Brooklyn as soon as my daughter, Emma, called to say she was on the way to the hospital with her husband. Move into their apartment for the duration to walk and feed Pearl, their sweet ancient Labrador. Wait by the phone.
Being assigned to canine care was perfectly fine; I was glad to be useful. It never occurred to me that I could actually be in the delivery room when this baby arrived, and it didn’t occur to my daughter to invite me, or anyone else.
Emma wanted a quiet, private birth with her partner and their nurse-midwife. Her own birth 30-some years earlier had been much the same.