There has been a lot of wonderful writing about peoples’ Covid Crisis stories, at DKos and elsewhere. Because my story comes from a position of undeniable privilege, I’ve hesitated to post it. Almost all Americans have suffered more, and continue to do so, than I and my beloved spouse of 50 years have done. Whining about what I have lost. when It is so much less than the afflictions of others, feels like bad form, and I would not wish to offend anyone with it. My friends, neighbors and others whom I know, along with uncounted people I don’t know, have been suffering loss of livelihoods, health or even their lives or loved ones, and could not care less about my petty problems, nor should they care more. When I hear about stupid antics of the rich and famous during Covid, like this, I become even more uncertain whether or not to tell my story. Yet, I can’t help feeling that this tale might resonate with other victims of Trump’s criminal malfeasance in responding to the crisis of this pandemic.
So, I write, because Donald John Trump and his Covid malfeasance have totally wrecked my retirement dreams, and careful plans put in place many decades ago and it really, really sucks.
Yeah, I know. Most people barely have retirement dreams, much less feasible plans to achieve them. When my spouse and I started out, we and our families had little more than whatever jobs brought in from decidedly blue collar factory and shop employment. Inheritance has forever been an idea foreign to the experience of our families. Pretty much everything, any of us has ever had, has come from good old fashion work. That and White Privilege. As my parents’ generation retired, it was pretty much Social Security that kept them from poverty.
I only got a university education because I was a war orphan due to my father’s death from a service connected disability dating back to 1919, and it was the same for my only sibling. When I left the Navy right after the Vietnam War, it was only the GI bill that made it possible for me to go to law school. Ms. Left and I met during our first year at university and married during the last. Our wedding, conducted at the university chapel with a cake and punch reception afterward at her sorority house, would need a bit of gilt to rise to what you could call modest. She made her own dress. She looked marvelous, but we started with pretty much nothing.
But that GI Bill law degree got us started and within a few more years, I was able to help put her through law school, too. After a couple of starter jobs, she found work in a field law office of a Federal regulatory agency, beginning a Federal Government law career that would last until she retired from that agency in 2016. While raising our family, we soon focused upon her federal employment as a potential key to comfortable retirement with all the bells and whistles, e.g. travel, culture, theater, fine dining and the many other features of typical bourgeois retirement dreams.
Over the years, her employer relocated her, interstate, twice, requiring me to move my practice twice, as well. As a general rule, a law practice isn’t very portable. For some reason, the clients don’t want to move. So, these moves entailed a degree of sacrifice in my career for the sake of her extraordinary Federal retirement benefits including one defined benefit and two fully matched defined contribution retirement plans, plus Social Security. So, I became a sort of itinerant litigator, eventually plying my trade in courtrooms in more than ten different states. For nearly a decade, I was an Assistant Attorney General and Division Chief at the Oklahoma State Capital. At the end of my career, for more than a decade, I was a field litigation counsel for the U. S. Postal Service. In between, I practiced personal injury and medical malpractice trial law in Texas and commercial law and bankruptcy in Oklahoma.
At the end, through hard work, hard won professional reputations and the considerable benefit of being White Folks in America, we managed to conjure up, from more or less nothing, a secure and comfortable retirement in the home of our dreams (with only a few nightmares incident to 110 year old houses) with plans and prospects of international travel and all the other benefits inherent to such a life, starting in 2016. Fucking 2016. Fucking Trump’s 2016, 2017, etc.
For our Golden Anniversary observance year of 2020, we had planned the trip of a lifetime on a luxury cruise on a small, all inclusive ship visiting nearly a dozen ports all over Scotland and its islands. We had cruised before, going back to the 1980s, as a comfortable, entertaining and enlightening form of travel. Since my Navy days, I’ve always love going to sea. That’s how we had come to spend the day of our 40th wedding anniversary at the pyramids on the Plain of Giza above Cairo, Egypt.
But, we were going to pull out all the stops for the only 50th anniversary we’ll ever celebrate, with business class air, private guides, and every other available bell and whistle. Heather and moor, highlands and lochs, mills, distilleries, churches, castles, palaces, museums, pubs and ‘airy coos. It was going to be wonderful. Based upon my Ancestry.com DNA report, I’m probably one of the whitest people you ever met and Scotland is the epicenter of my Western European roots, so that knowledge just made it better to me.
The ship never sailed, of course. But even so, the inability to travel internationally any longer, due to Trump’s incompetent management of the Federal response to the Covid pandemic, is the least of the problem.
When we retired, we didn’t down size, as many do. We had been crammed for years into an undistinguished condominium Northwest of Chicago, to afford my younger daughter the opportunity to complete high school at one of the finest public schools in Illinois.
In retirement, we instead reside in a vernacular townhouse which is listed in the National Registry of Historic Places and situated in the historic streetcar suburbs of St. Louis, MO, an area developed between 1890 and 1918. The property was in disrepair when we acquired it in 2014. With the help of an excellent architect, a flexible banker and a sorta good enough construction contractor, we carried out a gut rehabilitation of the house which now provides us with secure, safe and comfortable shelter.
The extraordinary walkability of our neighborhood can hardly be exceeded elsewhere. The nearby blocks off of the main streets offer a range of corner bars, restaurants and bodegas, many just a few steps from our front door. Just two blocks away, the closest major commercial district sports international cuisine of nearly every culinary tradition on the planet. Want Persian tonight? How about Turkish, or Lebanese, or Afghan, or Chinese, or Thai, or Vietnamese? No? Ok. Mexican? Italian? Brazilian? American Diner? Too late for dinner? How about ice cream, or cookies, or gelato? Within five city blocks of my front door, all of that could be found, and more. At least that’s the way it was when we bought the house. Wait! Is five blocks too far to walk? It’s OK, Just stop for a pint at Riley’s Pub, halfway.
But I can’t afford to go to any of those places, not health wise. I haven’t set foot inside of any restaurant or bar since March. We have memberships at the Art Museum and the Botanical Garden. I tried out the Botanical Garden some weeks ago. They did an excellent job on crowd control, distancing, masking and other good pandemic health measures. And it was totally outdoors. Yet, I couldn’t avoid the anxiety of knowing I was around others of unknown infection status and exposing myself to risks, even if infinitesimal, that I could avoid by simply staying at home. The idea of trying to enjoy the Art Museum or History Museum, otherwise two of my local favorites, and both indoor venues, totally freaks me out, again despite those institutions best efforts to make the experiences as safe as they can. Our Broadway season at the Fabulous Fox was totally cancelled, of course.
Sure, all these venues do the best that they can. But they are doing so against the backdrop of an incompetent Republican Governor and incompetent, probably evil Republican President, who would, apparently, be perfectly happy if I joined the culls of the herd, dropped dead from Covid, and stopped complaining. Like most of America, we have no systematic testing in this State, no contact tracing, no enforceable mask mandate nor any other measure likely to control and suppress the community spread of Covid, which now runs rampant all around me.
I’m a septuagenarian, Type II diabetic with a history of additional, pre-existing conditions putting me at heightened risk of suffering more severely than others, should I contract the infection. Worst, I have the most dangerous blood type anyone can have if they become infected.
After a life of planning, sacrifice, care and hope, I can’t really do much of any of what we had hoped and planned for. So much for travel, culture, fine dining, theater and all the rest. Not much left to do but sit quietly and write bitchy blogs. And I was perfectly able to do that from the basement of my erstwhile Chicago suburban condo before I retired.
Covid was always going to ruin our cruise plans last Summer, no matter who sat in the White House. But pretty much all the rest is the fault of Donald John Trump and his criminal enablers. His failure to even attempt to control community spread of the disease in the US is the only reason I cannot go to a museum, restaurant, bar or, fercrissakes, even a movie theater, without fearing for my very life.
Sure, I can go outside any time I want, and even walk past all those places that I cannot safely go. But it still feels a lot like house arrest . . . without the ankle bracelet.