Quarantine: April 2020
Month 1: Isolation, entertainment, and lots of walking
Here are my April 2020 diary entries that reflect on life during the first year of COVID-19. The entries serve as supplemental materials to my photo book — Keep Your Distance. Unless otherwise noted, the photos in this series are not part of the book.
To mark the pandemic’s fifth anniversary, these “Social Distancing Diary” installments will appear two to three times a month on Thursdays until March 2026. To see previous entries, visit this link.
April 9
The isolation of quarantine, even with a full house, is depressing. You find yourself searching for things to do but it’s difficult to focus on any one thing for a sustained period of time. It doesn’t help that I have ADD, something I didn’t get treatment for until I was in my 40s.
We think our family has had COVID. Jill lost her sense of taste and smell, as did Ben and his girlfriend, Gaby. Emma appears to be asymptomatic, while I feel like I’ve been run over by a bus.
For a while, I thought it was just allergies. It’s been one of the warmest winters on record in the Washington, D.C., area. That means spring allergies — the annual covering of cars with gross dots of pollen — came extra early this year. At a time when a sneeze or cough draws stares from even your closest family members, and the Centers for Disease Control warns you not to touch your face with your hands, allergy sufferers like me want to scratch our eyes out.
It is a truly miserable time. But given the outrageous number of cases spreading through New York and other places, what we’re dealing with is a minor obstacle. I just have to keep reminding myself that we are indeed very lucky.
April 12
A constant source of entertainment has been our son’s dog, Hammer, a Chihuahua Pomeranian mix who also is one of the sweetest — and prissiest — animals on the planet. He is never afraid to give you the look that says, “If you wanted an animal that was antisocial, you should have gotten a cat.”
At some point, Emma and I were talking about the very specific way Hammer eats. He takes a bite of several pieces of dry food, walks over to the nearby carpet and drops them, then eats one at a time.
Jill asked, “Hammer, do you like having them analyze the way you eat your food?” I looked at her and said, “We work for ESPN the Ocho. In times like these, this qualifies as a live sport.”
April 21
If there is an advantage to social distancing — the advantage label, from a business standpoint, is definitely a stretch — it’s that I’m now walking around town as much as I did when we first moved our son Ben to New York more than a decade ago.
Walking through Manhattan with my camera in the fall of 2009, snapping whatever caught my eye, is what started my journey into photography. Over the past week, since I started going out again, I have walked more than 40 miles through the streets of Alexandria. Each time, I've taken a slightly different path, walking through parts both familiar and as yet unexplored.
This past weekend, I walked 7 miles on Saturday and 8.6 miles on Sunday, by far the longest trek yet. The long and winding route Sunday went from King Street to the Potomac, then over into Del Ray and finally to Reagan National Airport.
My knees ached; this 55-year-old body is not used to this much free time for exercise. But I felt like I accomplished something.
Book Party
If you are close to the Greater Washington, D.C. area on May 29, I hope you’ll consider joining me at a party for the formal launch of my photo book, Keep Your Distance: Walking Through the First Year of COVID.
The free event, which will feature a social hour, interview/Q&A session, and book signing, will be held from 6 to 9 p.m. Thursday at Elaine’s in Old Town Alexandria. Tickets are limited to 50 guests who sign up here.
Keep Your Distance: Walking Through the First Year of COVID is available for $40 plus $5.95 for shipping and handling. You can order it by visiting this link.