On bears and bear markets
Maybe it's time to thank the Virgin
“Think of it this way: There are now only two groups of Americans. Group A includes everyone involved in the medical response, whether that’s treating patients, running tests, or manufacturing supplies. Group B includes everyone else, and their job is to buy Group A more time.” - Ed Yong in The Atlantic
It’s 7:30 am and I’m sitting on the couch in the living room with my laptop open on the footrest. I stumbled across a live panda webcast link and now I’m mesmerized by the crisp video footage of four chubby black and white stuffed animals hanging upside down on a rubbery tree branch. Except they are real. I’m getting a close-up look into the Happiness Village Baby Panda Garden in Gengda, Sichuan, China.
“Hey, come over here and take a look at this,” I say to my spouse Janyce as she enters the room with her coffee cup in hand and sits beside me on the couch. We watch the mostly silent video and drink our coffee. The pandas tumble over each other and the tree branch bends to what must finally be the breaking point. Every so often, through the white noise hiss of the background, I can make out the faint sound of birds chirping in the distance.
“They don’t seem unhappy even though they don’t have a lot of space,” I say.
“Well, you don’t know that. This is all we can see,” she says.
“Isn’t it weird that those people behind the fence over there are looking at these same pandas at the same time we are? All the way in China, and we’re here in this room,” I say. Janyce doesn’t answer me. She has made her way back to her computer at the table and is starting to look through emails.
It’s been three weeks since I’ve been in the house. The first week I spent my days in bed getting over a virus, maybe even the virus, only I will never really know. “Stay home and call us if it gets worse,” said my doctor. There were no tests to be had at the time and my symptoms were not the three classic ones on the CDC website.
The second week, I was propelled by a supercharged adrenaline. I’d stand at the stove assembling random food items from my refrigerator into a pan-fried hash for every meal. This three-meal-a-day cooking was my new vocation, and the steaming plate a benediction. I’d place my gift in front of Janyce at the table as an offering, a strange made-up meal to ward off the evil in the world, like a tiny food prayer.
In one of my earlier emails to my friend Roger, I said, “Send me any wonderful things you come across.” Over the days he has sent me live streams of the metropolitan opera, photos from an exhibit of Japanese paintings at an art museum at Harvard, articles about the emotional power of cooking, and the psychological virtues of walking. His latest link was to a website full of the odd animal head paintings by artist Matthew Grabelsky.
But my favorite bit of digital ephemera was the tumblr link to a slew of modern Retablos made in the Mexican folklore tradition. Retablos are these tiny oil paintings made on wood or tin and used as a small offering to a Saint as a thank you for their help getting you out of a tough situation. My favorite part about them, of course, are the few sentence stories that accompany the whimsical pictures.
Having suffered much for laundry chores, I pray for holy intercession from St. Kenmore, to relieve me of this eternal burden. I promise this retablo.
The night of November 16, 1974, all the dogs began to howl. We went out and saw the Weeping Woman floating over our houses. We entrusted ourselves to the Virgin of Guadalupe, and thanks to her this vision vanished in the night.
Ricardo Gutierrez was painting a graffiti on a wall. A neighbor got angry and let his doberman loose on him. With this retablo, he thanks Saint Benedict because his wounds have been healed and he didn’t get any infection.
On the third week in the house my attention has been diverted to my own personal financial housekeeping, something I barely ever think about, spurred on by the news on the radio about the economy. Our financial planner wants us to set up that meeting we have put off for too many months now. “Bear markets are normal,” reads a bolded subhead in one of my newsletters. “A bear market doesn’t necessarily indicate an economic recession,” says another.
Then there is the facebook barrage of first-person articles of young people in the hospital hooked up to ventilators, and my own reading of an endlessly long-form magazine article from The Atlantic filled with hyperlinks to at least a dozen other serious journalistic forays. In “How the Pandemic Will End” by Ed Yong, the news isn’t good.
“Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated, America has mishandled the COVID-19 crisis to a substantially worse degree than what every health expert I’ve spoken with had feared,” he writes.
Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated.
I feel a little like this now. Roaming from room to room and snapping pictures of the corners in my house, capturing the still life arrangements of the photos and artwork on my walls or catching my dog in an oblivious cute pose on the rug. Today at 4:30 on a Friday, I’m done with my many zoom meetings, text messages, and emails that make up my work. I return to my bedroom with the sun streaming through the window on a beautiful 60-degree day and climb back under the covers to listen to NPR and stare out into the woods.
Of course the most important takeaway from the Atlantic article is this one:
“Think of it this way: There are now only two groups of Americans. Group A includes everyone involved in the medical response, whether that’s treating patients, running tests, or manufacturing supplies. Group B includes everyone else, and their job is to buy Group A more time.”
Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated.
As a dedicated member of group B, I take some comfort in my own aimlessness, tempered only by a daily walk around the neighborhood, crossing from one side of the street to the other, staying six to ten feet away from anyone else passing by. In a way, my life right now is not so unlike the life of those five baby pandas tumbling over each other in slow motion, upside down and hanging on the wispy bending branches. Just like them, this is all I’m supposed to be doing.
The other night we went to bed at 9:00 pm at the insistent urging of our old dog after watching Mary Tyler Moore reruns on Hulu. We both woke early before the alarm even, talking to each other in the dark and pushing our sprawled-out dog away from us with our feet.
“What time is it?” said Janyce.
“Early,” I said. “I was having a dream.”
“I was having one too,” she said. “What was yours?”
“I was in a minivan and my father was asleep in the very back and I was in the passenger seat while my mother was driving. But then my mother pulled the car over and got out to stand on the curb. The car started to roll back and I couldn’t figure out how to get from the passenger side to the drivers side. And then I woke up.” I said.
We talked about how our dreams didn’t even require the dream dictionary this time, as they so blatantly conveyed our anxiety about being out of control. But reading mine again right now, it feels like it could be a Retablo. Maybe I should uncover the colored pencils and the pad of paper from the closet in the office.