Hygiene is the 1st Thing to Go

First, a quick quiz. Without looking it up, What day of the week is it?

The calendar, or at least our instinctive sense of what day it is at any particular time, has probably been another victim of the Covid crisis. Our daily routines have been dramatically altered, we are out of our usual rhythm, and many of us have slacked off a bit. With millions of people working remotely or affected by the stay-at-home orders, my guess is that many people are taking advantage of the chance to sleep in a little later and ease into their day at a slower pace. During the days when Kathleen was retired, and I was still working, she loved illustrating the difference in our personalities by describing the start of our summer. As soon as school ended, I knew that I had only two months to get a year’s worth of work and house maintenance accomplished. So I made lists. There was a master list, weekly lists, and daily lists. Kathleen always got a chuckle out of my master list that had things like “Run 400 miles,” “10,000 push-ups,” “Write two chapters,” “Paint two bedrooms,” “Read 20 Books,” “Re-Surface the driveway,” “Stain the back deck,” etc. etc. She would roll her eyes at my ambitious plans and say, “My only goal is to be out of my pajamas by noon.” I think a lot of people have that same attitude these days.

Living in a duplex/condo now, there is not nearly as much work to do, so my lists are more modest. I still get up at 5:00 most mornings and do some writing or reading for three hours before I feel as if I’ve done enough to have “earned” breakfast. It’s still dark up here until almost 7:00, so I can’t really get motivated to go outside anyway until mid-morning. Plus, it’s still cold most days, and we had snow flurries early on Thursday. My run, walk, or some combination of the two takes place about 9:30 or 10:00, and I try to get 5 or 6 miles in. So, not until after 11:00 do I finally take a shower. After six decades of showering before the sun is up each morning, it feels like a real luxury to shower that late in the day. I suppose that some people don’t shower at all; without regular social encounters, appearance has diminished in importance.

I also shave my face and head while in the shower. That’s where my slacking off comes in. After many years of shaving on a daily basis (except those times when I grew an ill-advised beard), I now shave only every other day. I figure, I’m not going to see anyone, so who really cares? There are some problems with this. After running, pulling a sweaty, nylon shirt off over my bristly head on the second day is difficult. My head grabs that shirt like Velcro and won’t let go. Still, at least once every 48 hours my head is gleaming like a freshly shaven, silent shroud of skull. (I believe Simon and Garfunkel first said that in their alliterative way; I’m not sure if the words are exactly right, or if, indeed, they were talking about my head.)

My step-daughter, Kristin, works at NASA, so she has been working at home for nearly a month. Someone in Huntsville created a tongue-in-cheek quiz to see how everyone was adjusting to their new work situation. Each question that received an affirmative response was rewarded with one point. They included such things as, Did you brush your teeth?  Did you take a shower? Are you wearing shoes?  Are you wearing pants? Did you get up at your regular time? There were twenty such questions and an accompanying scale with which to grade yourself. Kristin was awake and working, but she scored a “one.” Apparently, she received a point for logging onto an online conference of some sort. Aside from that, she might as well have been lying in bed.

A lot of the stuff happening around the country is so weird that it’s fascinating. Our lives have definitely been altered in both good and bad ways. I do think it’s important, though, to try to maintain a routine of sorts. After all, when this finally ends, I envision a rush to public places like we haven’t seen since the end of Prohibition in 1933. If I’m hanging out at the Nutty Squirrel that day, arm around some stranger, warbling a slurred version of “Happy Days are Here Again,” I want to make sure they don’t stink.