elizabethlevett

Every January I indulge myself in a trip to the bookstore to pick out a new desk calendar. I like the book kind, with pockets inside for stuff. One page per week. I like to write stuff in it that I have to do, or want to do, or did do. I keep track of things as the days pass, like birthdays, miles walked, when the plum trees came up ripe this summer, dates out with friends, you get the idea. 

But this year of years, when the days have all run together in such a crazy blur of emotion and response, dream and nightmare, this year when I actually heard a Christmas song at played inside a coffee shop in July, this year of years I didn’t do it. Didn’t get a calendar for on my desk. I remember going to look at them and thinking, “Maybe this once I’ll just see how it is to do without it. I can change my mind in a week or two and go back. By then they’ll be on sale.” But I never did. “After all,” I said to myself in January, “who’s counting?” That was before everything changed and each day was monumentally different from the one just before it.

Now, looking back at the past months, I almost wish I had kept some kind of log. Some way to note each day’s walk. As I climb the oak back-trails in the park, I wonder at how they’ve suddenly gone from deep green in the mist of April to a dry and wind-swept brown by July. I sit in the garden and wish I’d taken one photograph each time a friend dropped by for an outdoor visit. I’d have a nice visual record to show what was blooming at that time in the garden, how we set up the little table with napkins, a little vase of flowers, and that adorable lusterware cream pitcher, whether we had fish or frittata with salad, or just toast with coffee. I have no way of recalling just how many of these very, very different social encounters I had. It’s as though there is simply too much to keep track of and I sometimes feel like the train I’m on is speeding off the rails.

But numbers are everywhere. The cases of the virus in our city, how many have died, how many in the state and the rest of the U.S. There are daily reports of which countries are lowering their case load, which are going up. As of mid-July, 16,784,575 is the total for cases in the world. Of that number, 4,465,551 are in the U.S. We have the greatest number of cases. (We’re winning.) Only Brazil comes close with 2,455,905. Now of course, we do have a population of over 300 million. Nigeria, with just over 200 million, has only 41,180 cases. Japan, with 126,446,391, has 29,989. Important numbers.

I saw a graph showing the number of Americans who had lost their health care during the pandemic as compared with the same numbers in other countries. Again, the U.S. was at the top. According to the New York Times, between February and May, around 5.4 million Americans lost health coverage due to job loss. The number of those reporting loss of health care over the same time in every other country listed was 0. Somebody’s keeping track. 

According to American Public Media, “For each 100,000 Americans (of their respective group), about 74 Blacks have died from the coronavirus, the highest actual mortality rate of all groups-above Asians (31), Whites (32), Latinos (37), Pacific Islanders (48) and Indigenous people (60).” And the numbers differ by state. In Mississippi, 983 is the number for age-adjusted mortality rates for Indigenous people as compared with 28 for Whites. In the District of Columbia, there have been over 400 deaths of African Americans, as compared with just over 50 deaths of White people, while the New York numbers find these two ethnic groups relatively similar in mortality rates. According to the CDC, “more than a third of deaths among Hispanic Americans (34.9%) and almost a third of deaths among non-white Americans (29.5%) were in people younger than 65. That compares to 13.2% among white people under that age. 

So yeah, somebody’s counting. It’s easy these days to get caught up in my own experience of this day after day and week after week. (One week per page.) But I’m starting to think there are other things I want to spend my time keeping track of besides the number of miles I got in on any given week. And I want to find ways to do things that count, even if nobody writes it down. Every once in a while, I go over to the fabric store and buy pretty Japanese cotton and elastic to make masks for friends and people I meet who work at Trader Joe’s or Target. If I had a calendar I could keep track of my sewing, I could even take pictures of people in my masks and post these somewhere. But no, anyway, who’s counting?