"Someone should be writing about all of this,” she said.
“I bet a lot of people are.”
“Are you?”
“Not yet.”
“Too close to the trees?”
“Something like that. Maybe I’ll try today.”
“Coffee?”
“Is it caf or decaf?”
“Half and half.”
“Sure,” he said. “I’d like some. Thanks.”
She poured the coffee.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll bite. What should I write about?”
“Just what’s going on around us.”
“Not much is going on around us.”
“Or within us.” She sipped slowly. “One thing that keeps jumping out at me is that this is probably the only time in all of human history that virtually everyone on the planet is thinking and feeling almost the same thing.”
“Yes, that is pretty remarkable. I talked to Corinne in Holland, and she said that the first thing she does in the morning when she wakes up is to feel her forehead to see if she’s warm. Test her breathing. Clear her throat to see if she has a cough. I told her that I do exactly the same thing.”
“I think we all do. Everyone on the same word on the same page at the same time. For some reason I think that there must be something positive about that.”
“Positive?”
“Maybe beneficial is the better word. Maybe hopeful. Finally something we can all agree on,” she said.
“Maybe united as in that we’re-all-in-this-together,” he said.
“So you have been thinking about it.”
“I just ran across this in Gardner’s Life and Times of Geoffrey Chaucer: the plague swept across Europe five times in the fourteenth Century and killed more than one hundred million people. Imagine if Chaucer had been one of them. Then think about the Chaucers it did kill.”
“Write this stuff down.”
“Maybe. I don’t want to tempt fate.”
“Did you hear that John Prine died?”
“Breaks my heart.”
“’So if you’re walking down the street sometime/And you spot some hollow, ancient eyes,/ Please don’t just pass ‘em by and stare,/ Say hello in there.’”
“I hope he was not alone,” he said.
“I hope not,” she said.
They were quiet for a moment.
“A Kennedy half-dollar for your thoughts?”
“This is how people always lived before modern medicine a hundred years ago: never knowing if the next flu was going to kill them. Like my grandmother in 1918 leaving three little kids.”
“How old was your father?”
“Five. And Jack was seven and Alan was three. My father never forgot his father’s very slow footsteps on the stairs coming up to tell them that their mother had died. And if Anthony Fauci is correct that between a hundred and two hundred thousand American are going to die…”
“He said that?”
He nodded. “I sat down with my calculator. If he’s correct and things are proportional, which of course they never are, that means a thousand Chicagoans, maybe two. It means between ten and twenty people here in Evanston.”
“Maybe. But Chaucer’s plagues killed almost twenty-five percent of the population. One in every four people. We just think it can’t happen anymore. We think that if we don’t get our seventy-six point four years, we’ve been cheated.”
“More coffee?”
“One more cup. Then I think we should go for a walk.”
“A walk would be nice. The crocuses are up.”
And so were the daffodils, the first of the season.
