Disinfectant Injection

A poem

by A Person Who Has a Good You-Know-What

Supposing we hit the body with a

tremendous

whether it’s ultraviolet

or just very powerful light

and then I said supposing

you brought the

light

inside the body

which you can do either

through the skin

or in some other

way.

And I think you said

you’re gonna test that.

And then I see disinfectant

where it knocks it out

in a minute

—one minute—

and is there a way we can do

something like that by

injection

inside

or almost a cleaning.

Because you see

it gets in the lungs

and it does a

tremendous

number on the lungs

so it’d be interesting to check that.

So that

you’re going to have to use

medical doctors with

but it sounds interesting to me.

I think a lot of people are gonna go

outside

all of the sudden.

I would like you to speak

to the medical doctors

to see if there’s any way

that you can apply

light and heat

to cure.

I’m not a doctor

but I’m,

like,

a person who has a good

you-know-what.

I’m the president and you’re

fake news.

Zoom

Zoom in, if you can, on what’s behind me. Try to get a more refined look at the names on the spines on the shelves.

DeLillo. McCarthy. Strout. Murakami. Wallace. This is what I want to show you. What I carefully frame behind me.

A tiny bit of lemon-cake yellow wall perpendicular to summer-sky blue paints me with just a hint of creativity.

If the framing is successful, you will imagine me sitting down to read those novels, stamped, like USDA Prime steak, with “winner of the Pulitzer Prize” (roaring fireplace, snifter of brandy and smoking jacket optional) as the trivial world spins outside.

You cannot imagine that outside my constructed frame there could ever be piles of yellowing Avengers and X-Men comics or entire afternoons lost to Love It or List It.

No, my world is nothing more than what I am willing to show you. No need to imagine beyond these borders to see the ragged clutter I try to hide away.

The Budget Meeting

When I was a newspaper reporter, I covered school board meetings for years. Many of these were budget meetings, which were a special treat. Most residents didn’t come to these meetings; they just paid their taxes through their mortgages. (I don’t go to these meetings as a homeowner today. Unless there’s something outrageous going on, I’m not going to debate a line item on a school budget. Just take my taxes and use it to educate the kids.) However, there was a certain group of budget hawks who would attend. These people were well-meaning and would keep the school board honest.

Then there were the people at the budget meetings who were just jerks. They would just complain about their taxes, and most of them had money, which you could tell from the addresses they gave—it was never the poorer people. Anyway, at one budget meeting, this one woman stood up and started complaining. That wasn’t unusual but what was odd was that she started complaining about me. She didn’t address me but she started going on about how she never knew there was a budget meeting and nobody told her.

People on the board kind of looked at me sympathetically like, “Is she crazy?” One guy on the board told her, “Well, the paper does always list the school board meetings before they happen.” It was true: We listed these meetings on page 2 under the section helpfully labeled “MEETINGS,” so it’s not like we buried them on page 17F. When it was a budget meeting, we would often put the notice on the front page, knowing that people would be more likely to go. In the days before widespread internet, I don’t know what else we were supposed to do to advertise a budget meeting other than advertise it on the front page of a newspaper. Well, she didn’t read the paper, which I guess was everyone else’s fault for not forcing her to subscribe. She had just found out that the school board existed and she was all fired up that nobody at our paper sent her an engraved invitation to a meeting.

She ended by saying something snarky, then looked right at me and stomped out.

I was livid. It wasn’t just because this woman just touched down from Saturn and discovered the governing structure of her kids’ public school, but because she was making me late. This school board meeting went for hours and I was late for a dinner out somewhere and since it was before cell phones, I couldn’t let anybody know. She was one of the people keeping me there.

I really regret not following her outside and telling her off. I would have told her, “Lady, we only write the newspaper. We can’t make you read it and educating yourself is ultimately something you have to do. Your ignorance is not my fault. You are complaining about your taxes while I make $9 an hour trying to inform the public. I live in a tiny apartment at an address that’s not nearly as impressive as yours, and at this rate, I’ll never afford to buy a home and complain about my taxes. So if you’re going to bitch about paying $5 extra a month on your mortgage for kids’ education, don’t address your complaints to the guy who can barely afford a haircut.”

I forget how much later it was, but obviously I did quit the job, and I didn’t miss people like her or meetings like that.

The Year We Canceled Easter

The churches were still packed on that glittering Easter Sunday, but not with pastel fascinators bobbing to a recrudesced “Alleluia.” No, the sick were triaged on pews for the church’s corporeal work of mercy. No mad scramble outside for plastic eggs filled with jelly beans or dollar bills, with playgrounds long since roped off. That year, we compared menus on Zoom instead of smelling the same ham or pineapple.

We were stuck in a world of Holy Saturdays that would not end. TS Eliot’s lines about April’s cruelty, and torchlight red on sweaty faces, and frosty silence in the garden, and agony in stony places just repeating like a record’s run-out groove. We were suspended in unending Lent, giving up handshakes and hugs and company instead of Friday steaks and other vices. Nothing better to do but hunker down and wait for the Angel of Death to pass by …

… is what I will someday tell my grandchildren. And with any luck, they will think I am nuts.

Indoor Person

While we’re all watching society collapse while barricaded inside our homes, am I supposed to be learning some new skill or doing some amazing creative work? I’m really not. I’ve been carrying on as normally as I can, just in relative isolation.

I’ve never been one to bake my own sourdough bread and I’m not going to choreograph the three of us doing a tapdance in the kitchen and put it on … is it TikTok that everyone’s using? I’m not even spending my time watching videos of nurses and doctors and other people dancing and singing to entertain themselves. I’ll see those videos on the news or wherever, and they do make me smile, but I don’t seek them out. I’m not putting down people who do any of these things; they’re just not for me.

It sucks being isolated at home but I’ve found that I’m not really bored yet. I am enormously lucky that I can do my job from home easily and am enormously lucky that I have a job at all in this economy. So working all day in our back room fills the day, and there’s been some extra work to do as our company adapts. There is also parenting to do and making sure our son is doing his online work and keeping him busy when he would normally be at school. (We’re also lucky that our son is old enough that he doesn’t need constant supervision. Any parents who can work from home with younger children around have my awe.)

There’s still some more free time since I’m not driving two hours a day, but I’ve been filling it so far. I’m walking an hour a day before starting work, so maybe that will counteract the increased snacking and I’ll lose a little weight. I’ve started the early stages of spring gardening—might as well if you have to stick around your property. We’re watching our usual TV shows, new and streaming (I’m not interested in the tiger show I’m hearing about).

Mostly, I’m reading my face off as usual. I took out two books from the library the day before it closed. I wish I’d been smarter and taken out a bunch more books, since they’re not enforcing late fees, and even the book deposit outside is closed. I’m running out of new books here so I could use the library books. I have no problem re-reading old books, so I can do that. I can also look at e-books from the library, but I do love my old-fashioned paper.

But my rambling point is, I haven’t had to aggressively seek out new forms of entertainment. After a month inside, I’m bored in the sense that I’d love to socialize, but I have enough activities here to keep me busy. I’m learning even more that I’m an indoor person. You could sit me down with a stack of books to read and I wouldn’t notice the actual apocalypse outside my window.

Scroll Down for My Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe!

In these times of isolation, when it seems like everything is awful, many of us are returning to something that brings us comfort: Baking. So I’m going to share with you my tried-and-true chocolate chip cookie recipe, handed down from one generation to another in my family, like a precious jewel.

But first, let me tell you a story about those cookies. Ahh, the smell of chocolate chips wafting through my childhood. My earliest days are filled with this aroma of the gods. I remember Meemaw making these cookies throughout my youth. Meemaw, she lived in a cozy little house on the edge of the woods, right by the river. And she would bake these chocolate chip cookies every Sunday afternoon and all her grandchildren would come over.

And we’d all eat the cookies. When we were done, all the children would say, “Tell us a story, Meemaw!” And Meemaw would tell a story from the Old Country and she’d do a traditional folk dance from her childhood. And we’d dance and clap and sing along with her. She always gave us plenty of cookies to take home with us and those would last until the next Sunday, when we’d enter her house and our senses would be hit with that wonderful aroma once again.

When Meemaw died, she passed that sacred cookie recipe down to us. She wrote several copies of the recipe down on little scrolls of parchment and put them in special wooden boxes. My cousins and I each received a box during a special graveside ceremony. It was so emotional to open those boxes and see the recipe. I could swear the cemetery smelled like chocolate chip cookies that day. Well, that and manure.

ADVERTISEMENT

Maybe it’s my childhood connection with those cookies but I really believe food is the key to our souls and memories. It’s the thing that connects us and binds us. When you sit down at the table to celebrate with your loved ones, there’s always food on the table. Have you every noticed that?

What unites people? Armies? Gold? Flags? No. It’s stories. There's nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it. And stories about food and family are what get us by, what make life meaningful for us all. I can recall so many stories about food that I’ve told while eating food. One Thanksgiving, my parents regaled us with a story about a cheese fondue they made in the ‘70s where they accidentally added limburger cheese instead of Emmental. The story was so funny that we were squirting gravy out of our noses while hearing about all that cheese! And who can forget when Uncle Nigel talked about that deer he wounded (and then had to kill with his bare hands) over Christmas figgy pudding one year? What a delight!

ADVERTISEMENT

You know, chocolate chip cookies just bring me back to who I am as a person. What’s really important. This idea of belonging. Family. People who can and not people who can’t. People who will always be there for you no matter what. Cookies that will always be there for you no matter what. Butter, flour, eggs and chocolate morsels. Summer days you never wanted to end. That new car smell. The second law of thermodynamics. Swing sets.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time tozz get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

And I’ve tasted a lot of cookies since my childhood. Oreos. Lorna Doones. EL Fudge. Oatmeal raisin. Thin mints. Hydrox. Snickerdoodles. Macaroons. Macarons. I’ve tasted a lot of cookies, and I’ve learned a lot about myself.

ADVERTISEMENT

And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

You know, it’s so important to have a sense of community in your community. And that’s one of the things that food can do and one of the things that passing down recipes can do. It’s like you’re giving the next generation a little piece of your soul. When you make food, it’s not just a teaspoon of oil; it’s a tablespoon of caring. It’s not just a quarter-cup of water; it’s half a cup of love.

You’ve got big dreams. You want fame. Well, fame costs. And right here is where you start paying—in sweat.

Please read on for my special recipe for chocolate chip cookies!

INGREDIENTS

1 package of Nestle’s Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

DIRECTIONS

Open the package of Nestle’s Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough.

Break apart the pre-scored cookie dough.

Bake according to the directions.

Eat.