Straight to the point

The Story Could Have Happened Anywhere
by Christine Black at Brownstone Institute

“April is the cruelest month”

-T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”

I wondered where the poets were, during and after the Covid period, those who watched, lived, felt, and chronicled what happened. Sadly, a local Barnes & Noble bookstore featured a book, Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift’, a short five years after devastating losses, rancor, and heartbreaks of lockdowns descended in the spring of 2020. Silence and superficiality of the arts have stunned me. Maybe it will take years for artistic truth-telling. 

But this month of the fifth anniversary of the start of that terrible time, I found a poet, a sweet, zany troubadour in the Book No Further bookstore in the old section of downtown Roanoke, Virgina. I found Josh.

Josh Urban’s book, Cities on a Hill: 21 Isolated Months with the Elderly during COVID, was prominently displayed near the front of the store. As a frequent visitor to bookstores, Josh’s book shone as a welcome anomaly after searching for books or poems or art by anyone, especially young people, exploring what we have endured. I wondered about stories of those who had chosen between a shot they may’ve feared or a college education, for instance, as many colleges mandated Covid shots. Many people lost jobs and livelihoods when they declined mandated shots; will they write about what happened? Families and communities fractured with fear. Will art emerge about mental and spiritual breakdowns from not knowing what future we may have or from what many argue was crushing authoritarian overreach? What meanings will artists construct?

“JOSH. I’m JOSH,” Josh Urban writes about when he introduces himself to old people as he suddenly became the full-time activities director in March 2020 at Statler House, a nursing home that could have been anywhere in the country, he says. I imagine him leaning close to residents, who were scared and fading before his eyes. 

Identifying information and residents’ names were changed for privacy, but the story is true. The story “could have, and did happen anywhere,” Josh writes (p. 7). He had led a club at Statler House before Covid lockdowns. 

A DJ, guitar player, stargazer, and amateur astronomer, Josh suddenly lost his livelihood as a DJ when hard lockdowns cancelled events. One day when he was at Statler House for the club he led, an administrator asked him to be the activities director. “Music in the hall, magic tricks, anything?” the administrator proposed. After quickly calculating, Josh took the job to pay his bills. Then he’s dropped among isolated old people, some sliding into dementia when all activities and family visits are canceled. There’s a skeletal staff, soldiering through, and a resident who keeps taking his pants off. Josh wonders if he’s up to the task. 

“Ok, I’m here,” he writes. “What can be done to help, to slow the slide into madness, to get us all through?” he writes (p. 23). 

“Martha looked up at me like that sparrow,” the introduction reads. He describes a small, mostly deaf, bent-framed woman with white hair and a shaky voice. She reminds him of a sparrow he helped when he was a boy. She tells him she had a dream that he would write a book about their time together. “Don’t forget about us, Josh, okay?” He says he won’t and that if he does write the book, he will dedicate it to her.

Josh’s lines shimmer lightly in ways the best poetry does: “Somewhere between the rocking chair and my conscience – there it is again. A question intones in a quavery voice as I sit at my keyboard. Maybe it’s her ghost. Or maybe it’s just what’s right. Josh, will you tell them? / Yes, I will, Martha” (p. 6).

When I saw the book’s title and red cover, I told the bookstore owner, Deloris Vest, that crying may prevent me from getting through it. 

“Oh, you’ll cry,” she said. We traded Covid stories. I told her I had taught sixth graders during that time, 11-year-olds on Zoom while some were scared, in their pajamas, alone in their bedrooms, on government-issued laptops. I did my song and dance as best I could to cheer them up. She told me how she taught her grandson, in kindergarten at the time, to read using Minecraft books. Zoom school wasn’t working for him. Recently, she had to place a family member in a nursing home. After reading Josh’s story, she said, before leaving her loved one there, she made sure she knew where the windows were, how to use them, and made a plan to spring the relative if anything like lockdown should ever descend again. 

“A militant agnostic (p. 94),” Josh called himself before the Covid period, he writes, and then, in the middle of lockdowns, he’s reading the Bible aloud for old people, some of whom are sliding into dementia or going mad. He joins Mr. James, who reads the 23^rd Psalm in his deacon voice, and Josh reads the Gospel of John to residents. Quoting Matthew 5:14, Josh calls his new friends, “cities on a hill,” including Sam; Coach, who tells Korean War stories; Little Ms. Andrews, Leon, and Miss Golden. The Biblical phrase names his book. 

Published in 2023 by 1A Press in Rustburg, Virginia, the book is sparse, not long, with evocative subheadings. It features ample white space like a book of poetry. Sharp scene descriptions; poignant dialogue and characterizations; and shimmering lines make the subject bearable and the experience of reading it profound. His use of present tense adds immediacy. 

He sneaks Mrs. Burnside outside in her motorized wheelchair to eat lunch with him: “The fresh air greets our ravenous faces,” he writes (p.118). Mrs. Burnside talks about her farm from long ago, and he tells her about a snapping turtle, laying eggs in his front garden. He built a fence around it to keep the foxes out. After three lunches, they are caught, and the lunches cease.

Residents are PCR-tested weekly. A positive test locks the floor, whether it is asymptomatic, symptomatic, or a false positive. Staff are tested twice weekly, and staff positives lock all the floors. Lockdowns confine residents to their rooms. If residents test positive, whether it be with symptoms, without, or a false positive, they are sent to an unused ward, the isolation wing within the building, for two weeks, “with only the occasional nurse for human connection” (p. 87).

Nursing homes, schools, prisons, and insane asylums may share similarities during the Covid period. Will more of their stories emerge? At Statler House, new signs are erected and added all over – Only Two People at a Time on the Elevator, Visitors are Not Permitted to Use the Public Bathrooms (whenever limited visits resumed), Make Sure the Door is Locked Behind You; rules and procedures change seemingly arbitrarily, and enforcers watch and keep order. Josh is surprised that people are not throwing plates. He even titles a section, “On Not Throwing Plates” (p. 19). Humor, empathy, and Josh’s humanity help the reader bear this story.

A timeline from early 2020 to December 2021 in the book’s opening orients us in that strange, disorienting, and crushing time. Edicts barred family visits for Easter, Independence Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. On March 1, 2021 trailer visits were set up with a portable room in the parking lot. On March 3, an outbreak put trailer visits on hold for 14 days. On May 15, 2021, the governor opens restaurants to full capacity, yet nursing homes remained unchanged. The timeline includes many residents’ deaths, not from Covid. 

An official tells Sam, a resident, that the floor is “under quarantine,” and they can’t go outside. “Oh, for how long?” asks Sam. “Two weeks, if the next round of tests clears,” the official says. “The old man bows his head. In the room behind him, a crucifix hangs over a bowl of fruit. Jesus, unmasked, looks on. Nobody can meet his piercing gaze” (p. 110).

Gertie, a retired nurse, lived with her husband on the dementia ward until he died; then she moved back to assisted living. She shows Josh the app on her phone that tracks her steps and tells him that if she goes to three meals a day and bingo, she walks a mile. During a lockdown, Josh visits her in her room. He knocks on her closed door. “I’ve got an isolation gown on. According to the rules, that makes it OK to visit,” he writes (p. 81). She tells him that she walked a mile yesterday. “How?! They aren’t letting people out,” he asks. “I did laps right here in my room.”/ Gertie, that’s like a prison workout. Rock on,” he writes (p. 82). 

On the Statler House porch, Josh builds a DJ cart and lets “Little Mrs. Beecher” run the circular saw and hopes he doesn’t get sued. He rolls the cart from floor to floor and positions residents in their doorways to hear music. Their dementia worsens with the isolation: “Joan pokes her head out. The isolation will make her crack, too. One day she tells me she has stolen a car. Before this is over, she’ll be on the secure memory care ward to stare her days away. Millie will join her, but we don’t know that yet.” (p. 33).

Josh mingles Covid policy descriptions with memorable vignettes and poetry. From his DJ cart, he plays records: “A hundred times the cart has rumbled to a stop. A hundred times Millie has sat in her doorway and listened. Three hundred times I’ve reminded her to stay in her room. Fifty times she asks why. 

Zero times does she understand. . . Summer greens the trees outside the heavy windows. Inside, Life is frozen in place,” he writes (p. 36 -37). 

Describing the dementia ward, he writes, “After a few weeks, it’s obvious that some TVs could be fixed, and some more people talked to, and some books could be read and stories heard. A hundred ways to be useful flash up, blinking like beacons. Hear me. See me. Help me. I adjust accordingly. Weeks turn into months. The curve isn’t flattened, but the goal posts have moved,” (p. 35).

He fills bird feeders and describes the nurses, who are tougher than him, he says. Temeka, for instance, smokes and chuckles through nicotine and fatigue. “On these front lines, she’s a gunner, and I’m the drummer boy,” he writes (p. 41). He builds more bird feeders in his garage woodshop and installs them for the residents. Old ladies like to know who is there, “so I take to parking [the red Kia] where they can see,” (p. 22).

 The dementia ward is euphemistically called Memory Care. He writes, “Strangely enough 20 odd ghosts are less affected by the lockdowns than any other floor. Memory Care is always quarantined. It’s a secure floor on the best of days. A lady who thinks it’s 1965 will absentmindedly brush away a mask,” (p. 86). These residents can’t understand “social distancing,” which, he says, makes about as much sense to them as “collateral damage” (p 87). They miss their families, which worsens their confusion. 

Josh conveys his moral angst when he is called to help three people hold down Mr. Rich, who “doesn’t want his COVID test” (p. 159). “He yells, not understanding through his dementia,” Josh writes. “You guys are in for it. Next time I see my buddies. . .” Mr. Rich says (p. 60). 

Paintings on the walls, painstakingly described, acquire a hyper-real quality in the isolation and quiet, extending week after week. Often the dining room is empty. The activities calendar remains affixed in the hallway, though all activities have been cancelled. Old people sit in their rooms by themselves, and when they are out of their rooms, they are spaced six feet apart, facing the same direction. Josh leads bingo, tries to be cheerful, plays guitar, plays records, including Johnny Cash, Elvis, Patsy Cline, Fats Domino, and a Grieg piano concerto for Ms. Abbey, who loves classical music.

When there is no music, he captures the eeriness, the quiet, such that you can almost hear the sad sunlight. Late in this story, when he begins a bingo game, a learned helplessness and despair has set in. He asks another staffer: “Laurie, where is everyone? Lockdown’s over for now. It’s safe for them to come out.”/ “They say they’d rather just stay in their rooms” (p. 201).

“I feel like a water boy in Hell,” he says to his mom when he calls her. “What do you bring to people who are burning?” Josh brought them listening and remembering their stories, playing guitar, sitting with them for visits, telling jokes. He brought them music. Witnessing. 

When he realizes there hadn’t been church for a year, he builds 3/4 life-sized cross in his woodshop at his house, “table saw spitting blue smoke and barn board” (p. 165), and lugs the cross into the building. The staff and residents had grown used to his eccentricities. 

If I had a loved one in a nursing home during Covid-era lockdowns, and I couldn’t spring him or her for whatever reason, I would want someone like Josh there among my loved ones.

Along with poetic prose, this book includes lined poems, arranged in sections entitled, “Hallway Snapshots.” One reads, “Hallway Snapshot: Cheesus.” It appears towards the end of the book: 

Ruby has a way

Of calling me over 

To her lunch table

So I’m not a staffer 

And she’s not a fading old lady

Who pays too much for her double room.

But the grandma that she is.

“Saved you a little something.”

And slips me an extra mozzarella stick

In a paper napkin

As plain as our days

As ordinary as

The Eucharist

The Story Could Have Happened Anywhere
by Christine Black at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society

Source: Brownstone Institute Read the original article here: https://brownstone.org/