So, how were your holidays? Merry and bright, I hope. Mine were weird.
Three days before Christmas, my stepdaughter, her husband, and their 2-year-old twins were on their way to Memphis, driving from Brooklyn to spend Christmas and New Year’s with us.
We’d prepared our house for their visit, setting up cribs and high chairs and dragging all the tricycles, toy trains, and other toddler detritus out of the storage room. We’d prepped one guest bedroom for the boys and the other for their parents. It was going to be big family fun for 12 days! Then it all went sideways.
On the day of their planned arrival, my stepdaughter called and said one of the twins had tested positive for Covid. They were eight hours from Memphis. I called my doctor (also a friend) and asked him what we should do. He said, “After being in the car together for a couple days, the whole family will probably test positive at some point. If you and Tatine stay there, you’ll get it.”
He was a very good prognosticator.
No Airbnb in town was going to take a covid-exposed family of four, especially one needing two high chairs and two cribs. So Tatine and I decided to move out and let them have our house. And so the holidays began.
Unable to get a Airbnb on short notice, we spent our first night at The Memphian, the new hotel in Overton Square. For the record, it’s pretty swell, with well-appointed rooms and a friendly staff. Tiger and Peacock, the rooftop bar where we had dinner, is an eclectic and pleasing space — and gets extra points for not ampersanding Tiger and Peacock.
The next morning, after booking a Midtown Airbnb for five days, we went over to “our house” to see the kids and the grandkids. We sat on the deck, six feet apart, masked, no hugs. No one was feeling sick. The kids were running around like normal — riding their trikes, playing with the dogs — as the adults drank coffee and pondered the weirdness of it all.
And so the holiday pattern was set: Meet somewhere outside in the mornings — Shelby Farms, Overton Park, Audubon Park, the backyard — and hang out until the boys’ afternoon nap time. We were fortunate that the weather gifted us with a return to October for 10 days.
The second twin tested positive on the third day; their father on the fifth day; their mother on the eighth. Meet the Domino family. Nobody ever felt ill. The boys had no idea they were “sick.” It was bizarre. We were all sort of stuck in place. (And our dogs were really confused.)
Tatine and I moved into three different Airbnbs over the course of nearly two weeks, testing negative throughout. (If you need advice on finding reasonably priced Memphis Airbnbs, hit us up.)
The two of us had a lot of quiet time on our hands. I was finally able to finish The Overstory, which I recommend. I also relentlessly read about the Omicron Covid variant that had so warped our holidays. I soon became irritated at the American mass media, which kept headlining the “soaring” Covid infection rate, which was obtained by adding the numbers for Delta and Omicron. It was scary on the surface, but it was a sloppy and misleading conflation of two variants with entirely different symptoms, hospitalization rates, and morbidities. Combining their infection rates into one number was about as useful as combining tetanus and whooping cough stats. You don’t learn much about either disease.
Thankfully, by last weekend, the real story started to emerge: Omicron does not invade the lungs or kill people like Delta did, especially those who are vaccinated. Hospitalizations are not likely to rise to anywhere near peak pandemic levels. Omicron blew through South Africa in five weeks and the country’s death rate didn’t change one percentage point. The further good news is that Omicron pushed the far more deadly Delta variant to the sidelines.
I took this information as something of a Christmas gift. The next few weeks may be tough, but I think there is finally light at the end of the pandemic tunnel. And that will be something truly worthy of a holiday.
