Yesterday was rough. While our nice upper east side apartment is fairly large by most standards, it is still just an apartment and 8 months ago we were living in a house with a big back yard. Here, we work on laptops at the dining room table while the kids go to school online in their bedrooms. The main TV is in the one main room—the living/dining/office/bar/foyer room. So when a kid has a break and wants to watch a movie, or someone wants to watch the news, we can’t. That doesn’t really seem like a big deal, I know. But on day 30 of isolation, it’s getting to be a bit much.

I count March 3rd as the official day of my quarantine. It was the day I learned that my first child’s school was closing. The next day, March 4th, my other child received word of their school closing. Two weeks later, my husband was working from home full-time. So now here we all sit, listening to the radiators bang on at 6am, inhaling each other’s air, day after day, four stories up.

The doormen are wearing masks and gloves down in the lobby below us. There are memos taped up in the elevators asking all residents of our apartment building to please call down to the doorman on our “house phones” whenever we need to ask them for something—like a delivery inquiry or maintenance request—instead of going down to the lobby and asking them face to face. It actually says that. No face to face requests. And it should. It’s a good rule. But on day 30 of isolation, it’s freaking me out a little bit—and not because I have any weird hangups about people telling me what do. No. It’s freaking me out because it’s forced me to realize that the nice little daily chit chats I’ve had with our doorman are the only outside human interaction I’ve had in a month…and I will miss them. Oh, the doormen of NYC... They tell you to watch out for rain and warmly welcome you home and make you feel like you immediately belong in a strange new city where no one else knows your name. I can do a whole separate post on them…

But, as I said, yesterday was bad. The walls were closing in. Sick of cooking, we splurged and heated up chicken curry from William Polls for dinner. We banged into each other in the narrow galley kitchen reaching for the last of the diet coke. How narrow is the kitchen? When you open the dishwasher (for which we are very grateful to have in the first place) its door fills the kitchen’s entire width and meets the wall opposite. You have to hop over the door if you want to pass. It’s that narrow.

We ate in front of the TV. We are eating more and more in front of the TV lately. Our white slipcovered Ikea couch wasn’t made for this kind of constant use. Someone dropped curry on a seat cushion and someone else sat on it and we were all fine with that.

We opened two living room windows during dinner because the radiators were cranking out heat even though they were off. At 7pm, we heard commotion coming from outside. It was cheering and clapping. And it was so strange, I googled it. Turns out that the city has been clapping and cheering in appreciation for its hard working health care providers every night at 7pm for the hospitals around us like Weill Cornell, Lenox Hill and Sloane Kettering. I know It sounds small. Like maybe no big deal. But to literally stick your head out of a window and hear the whistles and cheers coming from all of the high-rise apartment buildings lining the street was another story. We were amazed. We were inspired. We screamed for them. It was unifying and hopeful and it was just what I needed. It lifted my spirit more than I ever thought something that simple ever could. Hopefully, it lifted the health care provider’s spirits as well. They deserve it, and so much more.

Just then, one of our doorman came out to see what was going on. We are four stories up and directly above the front doors, so we have the perfect view of people coming and going. He looked up at me, whistling shrilly with two fingers like a lunatic, and he laughed. My children waved at him, hanging out the other living room windows, clamoring for his attention. Apparently we’re all going to miss our little face to face chats.

Click on the link below to read my other posts.