Craig Spencer MD MPH is the Director of Global Health in Emergency Medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. You can read his bio here. After doing so, you will be impressed. He knows a thing or two about diseases and the treatment of them. Five years ago, after treating patients in West Africa, where he coordinated Doctors Without Borders national epidemiological response during the Ebola outbreak, he was diagnosed with the virus and treated in New York. He remembers the hysteria surrounding Ebola as well as the jokes ‘e-bowling’ – and how it dissipated. But Ebola and Covid-19, he warns, are very different.
I don’t know him. I found him on Twitter the way you do when you are holed up in your living room, scouring social media for something heartening. It was one of those “You must read this thread!” imperatives from a stranger I follow that got my attention. It might get your attention too. It should.
Working on the frontlines in the ER, Dr. Spencer is using his Twitter feed to share some thoughts about how we can stay safe and protect others. I am taking the liberty to post them here, in one place, so that those of you who are not on Twitter can help spread his message. Please just stay home.
Nine days ago . . . from Dr. Spencer’s Twitter account
Every one of us will be impacted. Maybe you read about ‘social distancing’ and don’t totally understand/agree why it applies to you. You may think it’s fine to go to bars/restaurants, cause you’re young and healthy. You hear it’s ‘just the flu’ . But this is a big deal. We must stop the spread of the virus, and we all have a role.
Every interaction – at large concert halls & small dinner tables too – is another opportunity to spread this virus. Even when we are being extra cautious, us humans are not perfect. Viruses spread. We can only slow this by limiting our exposures. So why is that so important?
Even if the virus doesn’t hit you as hard (and there’s no guarantee it won’t – there’s been lots of young people put on life support), so many people around us are older, have weakened immune systems, or are more prone to infection. Limiting OUR exposures limits theirs too!
I’m just leaving work in the ER. We already have #COVID19 cases. The # increases EVERY day. If they keep going at this rate, our system will be overwhelmed. We won’t have the space, personnel or supplies to provide the best care to our #coronavirus AND our regular patients.
Our best hope right now is social distancing, or limiting our exposure to others. This slows how fast the virus moves in our communities, which decreases how many people get infected, which slows the spread of the virus, and so on . . .
If we can do this NOW by limiting these exposures – at bars, restaurants, schools, etc – we can decrease the number of people coming to our ERs every day. Our system will still be stressed, but not overwhelmed
“If it isn’t too forward, would you like to meet?”
Why not? Why not meet the tall stranger who says he’s slender and likes Bob Dylan and will open doors for me? Why not?
Between the time I met my husband and the time he died twenty-four years later, the search for romance and Mr. Right had moved online, a perfect place for me to spend time, my dearest friends told me. It would be fun, they said, a simple way to reintroduce myself to the world as the single woman I had been in the days before smart phones and texting and instant gratification. Online, they convinced me, I could be equal parts brainy and breezy, hiding behind pictures that only show my good side, dodging questions with cryptic clues about what I did for a living or the kind of man who might be the right kind for me. In a flurry of box-checking, it would be easy to filter out men who didn’t like my politics, my hair, or my taste in music and who didn’t care if I was as comfortable in jeans as I was a little black dress but did care – thanks be to God – about when and how to use ‘you,’ ‘you’re’ and ‘your.’ I could be Meg Ryan’s Kathleen Kelly in “You’ve Got Mail,” having evolved (not really) from her Sally who had met Harry a decade earlier, right around the time I immigrated to the United States. Yes, my next chapter could be – would be – the stuff of a Nora Ephron rom-com.
Fictional Sally was an extension of Nora Ephron – single-minded with a certain way of ordering a sandwich exactly the way it needed to be for her. And, while most of us remember her most in the throes of that spectacular fake orgasm in Katz’s Deli, for me she shone brightest in a scene that to this day snaps me back to the young woman I used to be, the one who will still show up to remind me how little time I have to become who I am supposed to be. Life, she asserts, is what happens in between the beginnings and the endings – in the middle – and in the twinkling of an eye. It is also for the living. She’s right. Of course she’s right. When she realizes she’s “gonna be 40 . . . someday.”
Sally is barely thirty and sporting a sassy hair cut that in 1989 should have worked with my natural curls. It didn’t. It gives me no pride to tell you that I carried in my wallet, for several years – maybe a decade – a page from a glossy magazine that featured Meg Ryan’s many haircuts. For countless hairdressers rendered clueless and incompetent by the state of my hair, I unfolded that page as though it were the Shroud of Turin and coaxed them into giving me a Meg Ryan haircut. Any Meg Ryan haircut. Not until I turned 50-ish, did they ever get it quite right, but that is a story that has been told here before and one that does not belong in an online dating profile – unless the late Nora Ephron is writing it.
Remember when 40 was an eternity away from 20? It was the deadline for letting oneself go. 50 was sensible and dowdy. 60 heralded blue rinses – for hair not jeans. 70 was out of the question – definitely not a “new 50.” And, now I’m gonna be 60 . . . one day. One day soon. It’s time to take stock of all I have accepted about myself, the “alternative facts” if you will. Some are minor – I don’t have sensible hair, and until lately I have spent a fortune coloring it and trying to tame it. Then, there are fonts. Fonts matter in ways they shouldn’t – if I don’t like the lettering on a store sign, I won’t shop there, and Comic Sans on homework assignments forces me to question the teacher’s judgement. Even though I recently found out that it’s bad for the car, I only buy gas after the E (for empty) light comes on. Because I really don’t care any more, I can tell the world that I don’t like Les Miserables, and I even fell asleep during a performance of the musical version. I don’t like Coldplay. A music major, I have to also admit that opera doesn’t do it for me either, and I only went to the ballet once because all the other mothers were taking their daughters to see “The Nutcracker” for Christmas. I resent the aging process and the way it sneaks up on me at the most inopportune times. Once upon a time, I could read without assistance the small print on the back of a shampoo bottle (in French and English). Now, I spend less time reading than I do searching for one of the pairs of cheap reading glasses I bought at the carwash or found on a desk, forgotten by some other woman in a similar predicament. My hearing isn’t what it used to be either, which I would rather blame on my attendance at concerts over the past forty years than on something as graceless as aging. My memory is unreliable too – thank you cancer treatment. I can tell you what I wore and with which handbag on June 5th 1984, but not where I’m supposed to be tomorrow evening. If Mr. Right cares about punctuality, he should probably know I have a stellar capacity for getting lost. Although, with factory-installed GPS navigation systems de rigeur and knowing there is most certainly an app for that, I am much better today at finding my way around the greater Phoenix metropolitan area. To be fair, if I have been somewhere at least eight times, I can get there without much assistance, but until such times, I must lean on Google maps, Siri, my daughter reading directions from the phone that is smarter than both of us, and those friends and colleagues who consistently “bring me in” by phone from my destination – where they are already waiting.
Other truths are more painful. I almost learned from my time in cancer country to be kinder and more patient – with myself and others. Those who know me best will attest that I have yet to reach a level of proficiency in either area. You see the circumstances around my husband’s death shattered my sense of certainty and made me cautious. The result? A fragile guardedness reminiscent of a temperamental garage door. At the end of the day, it’s all about survival and control.
But who would want to read any of this in an online dating profile? Even Nora Ephron would probably not have described herself the way her son’s documentary characterized her as having “a luminous smile and an easy way of introducing herself, but a razor in her back pocket.” It’s much safer – and easier – to sparkle and enchant the way you would on your curriculum vitae – except you have to be cuter, avoiding clichés and divulging your home address. You have to accept that it is going to be awkward especially if the last time you were ‘out there‘ was 1989, when, if you met a man at a bar, you did not already know his political persuasion or his favorite movie, or if he had a tattoo. You wouldn’t know his deal-breakers either. He would buy you a drink, ask for your number, call a day – or maybe two – later, take you to a movie the next weekend, and over time – real time – you would build the scaffolding necessary to weather every storm in a teacup.
Awkwardly, I built a dating profile. I checked the boxes, being scrupulously truthful about my age, politics, and marital status while taking some liberties with other details like hair color and the frequency of visits to the gym. I omitted the part about the razor in my back pocket. This was resume writing, right? My best friend reminded me I have an unparalleled expertise in gray areas which reminded me not to give too much away. Emboldened, I provided ambiguous and annoying responses to the simplest questions: Favorite thing? The right word at the right time. Perfect date? Anywhere there’s laughter. Hobbies? Binge-watching Netflix originals. You get the idea, and you will therefore understand why I soon abandoned the idea of online dating – or it abandoned me.
About a year later, after a period of offline dating which left me thinking my remaining days would be better spent alone, my best friend convinced me to take one more field trip online. Obediently, I touched up my profile, uploaded a recent picture in which I wore my favorite green shirt, and waited to see what would happen while also weighing the benefits of spending my golden years in a convent.
“If it isn’t too forward, would you like to meet?”
Why not?
I took a chance.
I. Took. A. Chance.
#ITookAChance
Ignoring the raised eyebrows and sage advice from the online dating experts who would deem his boldness a red flag, I broke protocol. Without any protracted emailing phase, I agreed to meet the tall and forward stranger the next afternoon. A quick study, I had filed away the important bits – he was a liberal, a non-smoker, and a music-loving musician who was divorced and had a young daughter. I dismissed the interest in football (the American kind, for God’s sake) and golf (eye-roll), hoped he meant it when he checked ‘no preference’ on hair color, and held on to his mention of integrity – and the picture of the Harley Davidson.
Box checked.
He said he worked out every day – of course he did. And, no religion too. No deal-breakers. He had my attention.
Still, disenchanted by dating – online and off – I half-expected Mr. Forward to be five feet tall and 95 years old. Who knew if his pictures were current or if he had built his entire profile on a foundation of fibs? Maybe he didn’t really like Bob Dylan (deal-breaker) and maybe he went to the gym three times a day. Why so cynical? Well, let me just tell you there are more than a few men in the land of online dating who claim to live in the Arizona desert – but also enjoy moonlight walks every night – on the beach. Honest to God. Given all of this and what I’d gleaned from Googling “lies people tell on online dating sites,” I had no expectation that he would remember my name, anticipating instead the possibility of being number five or six in ‘the dating rotation.
It was a Monday. I had sent a breezy text suggesting we meet at 5 at a well-lit bar. I was wearing the outfit I had worn in my profile picture perhaps to prove that the photograph had been taken within at least the past decade. There was no way he would know there are still clothes in my closest from the 1980s. It was also a good hair day, my hairsylist, Topher, having redeemed himself with fabulous beachy highlights (just in case a moonlight walk was in the cards). On the inside, I was a mess, embroiled in a legal battle that I’m probably not allowed to discuss here or anywhere else, but I think I probably told him all about it within the first five minutes. The Harley I’d seen in the photo was parked outside, silver steel shimmering. Like a Bob Seger song. Unless he had borrowed it just for our first date, this was a good sign.
Onward.
He was sitting at the bar, staring ahead, and I watched him watch me out of the corner of his eye as I walked the plank all the way from the front door to where he sat. Butterflies. Even though I know you’re not supposed to have any expectations, I had prepared myself to be let down and lied to, but my instinct told me that the man at the bar was not going to lie to me and that I would not lie to him.
Over beers and banter, we sized each other up and over-shared, checking off those boxes our middle-aged online personas had created. He loved Bob Dylan. The Harley was his. Virtuality was becoming reality and although I was skeptical – sorry, musicians, but you have a reputation to uphold – I was also smitten. The bar closed, and off we went to another where the bartender took a photo of us in good lighting and told us we were photogenic enough to be “the desert Obamas.” Flattery will get you anywhere.
Having read and committed to memory the FAQ section of the online dating site, I knew this was another red flag. First dates that are too long (or turn into second dates on the same night) are deemed more likely to create a premature and false sense of intimacy. Too much too soon, the experts say. They’re probably right, but I’ll be damned if we didn’t do it again the next night and most nights since. We’ll do it tonight too.
A match made in heaven? No. In spite of all the tactics and algorithms deployed to make sense of our checked boxes and declare us a 100% match or subsequently updating our relationship as ‘official’ on Facebook, we are making this match right here, right here where angels fear to tread, in the messiness of the middle of two lives that collided at the best and worst of times. There is no wrong time.
As for the rest of the story? The rest of the story is for me. And for him. As Rob Reiner reminded me in his tribute to Nora Ephron:
‘You don’t always have to express every emotion you’re having when you’re having it.’ There’s a right time to talk about certain things, and you don’t need to be out there all the time just spewing. It’s how you become an adult, and I think she helped me see that.
P.S. Because I know you want to know, I asked him what compelled him to be so forward in the first place. He says he thought the woman in the picture was looking directly at him. I tell him there’s a song in there. Let’s sing it.
The following post was also published on the Irish Times website as part of a collective tribute to David Bowie from Irish writers Julian Gough, Joseph O’Connor, Edna O’Brien, Roddy Doyle, Eimear McBride, Hugo Hamilton, John Kelly, John McAuliffe and many others – David Bowie: Irish Writers Pay Tribute
It was just after one o’clock in the morning. On my bedside table, a tiny screen lit up with a message from another planet and three words that still don’t belong together: “Bowie is dead.“
David Bowie is dead.
It was cancer that took him, a cancer he kept private from this world – my world – of which he was so much a part yet always apart.
David Bowie had cancer.
Four words that do not belong together.
The strange and unsettling sounds of Black Star had filled the rooms of my house since the album’s release on his 69th birthday, just three days before. “Lazarus” had stopped me in my tracks that weekend, prompting me to mention to my daughter that I thought it sounded like the work of a man at the end of his life – a brilliant man who for decades had illuminated the edges of my life – my world – with his sound and vision. I didn’t dwell on the thought. Maybe I didn’t want to tempt fate.
In the middle of any David Bowie song, I still find bits and pieces of the stories of my life. My favorite color, the best to wear for a television camera, is blue, “blue, blue electric blue.” The ring-tone on my phone reminds me who I think I am, mostly at inopportune times when I might be sitting at a conference table, uncomfortable in an ill-fitting suit.
“Rebel, Rebel!”
Relentless, it blares out “How could they know? Hot Tramp I love you so.” Hot tramp. Swirling in my brain when I am lonely on a Saturday, “Let me put my arms around your head. Gee, it’s hot, let’s go to bed.” Or on just another day when I’m in the deep end again, but unafraid because I know that “we can be heroes, just for one day.” We can do anything.
We’re a different kind.
Beginnings and endings. Question marks. Full stops. A pause. A change of key. A change of heart. A post-script. A footnote.
Always, always a Bowie song.
Ain’t there one damn song that can make me break down and cry?
More than one.
Selfishly, I want you bound to earth again, David Bowie, and all the young dudes to carry the news. I want Time to take a cigarette with Ziggy on guitar, and forever – forever – to just let the children boogie.
Bowie is dead.
I am reminding myself of the way my late husband responded to Lou Reed’s passing. I recall his profound sadness over the death of the strange stranger who somehow knew him and his wild side better than I ever did. I know that now. He refused to talk about Lou Reed’s death. It was his struggle, I suppose, with the reality that there would be no more new tales from the dirty boulevard. And, maybe there was something else, a psychic inkling that just 18 days later, he would fly, fly away too.
I compromised. In lieu of a conversation at our kitchen table, I wrote instead about the death of Lou Reed. It was just twelve days before her father died, that I set down on paper a memory of the first time my only child discovered her beautiful hands. For me, her besotted mother, it was on the edge of magic. We called it “hand ballet.” And she, transfixed, staring intently, unblinking, at those little fingers that in a twinkling would cooperate to clap hands, tie laces, create pictures, make music, whisk eggs, and wipe away tears.
Suspended in one singular thought, my baby girl and the late Lou Reed their elegant hands in motion – she saying hello to her hands, he waving goodbye. His wife, Laurie Anderson, wrote that Lou Reed spent most of his last days on earth “being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on a Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.”
Beginnings and endings.
So that weekend before he died, I listened to “Lazarus” and David Bowie telling the world he would be free – just like that bluebird – taking me back to the sunny drive-in Saturday before I gave birth to my daughter, eighteen years before. Standing with her father in the space that would become her first place, I was nervous and unprepared for the extent to which our lives were about to change. Absolute beginners, we absolutely loved each other, and the rest could go to hell.
Superstitious, we had decided not to find out if I was carrying a boy or a girl. The nursery was ‘gender neutral,’ its sole splash of color a painting of animals and birds in a forest, vibrant and wild in primary colors. I do not remember the details of our conversation that afternoon, but I remember a pause, when that man of mine peered into the painting and pointed out the bluebird perched in dark green foliage. I hadn’t noticed it before.
“Look.” he said. “A little bluebird of happiness – waiting for our new baby. A bluebird of happiness. Isn’t that something.”
It was. It was something. It was a moment – a moment we clung to as long as we could. We were absolutely happy, we were creatures in the wind, we were Pretty Things. We were heroes.
Thank you, David Bowie, for dazzling me with your ch-ch-ch-ch-changes so I have never been afraid of mine. For keeping me young and curious and hopeful even on the darkest of days, I absolutely loved you.
Wherever you are, even if you’re feeling a bit lost, you are sure to find yourself in the final essay from Local Wonders by Ted Kooser. It’s a lovely reflection on life and loss and on looking ahead – where the world is waiting for us. Enjoy:
Life is a long walk forward through the crowded cars of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names we long remember and passing acquaintances whose names and faces we take in like a breath and soon breathe away.
There’s a windy, perilous passage between each car and the next, and we steady ourselves and push across the iron couplers clenched beneath our feet. Because we are fearful and unsteady crossing through wind and noise, we more keenly feel the train rock under our legs, feel the steel rails give just a little under the weight, as if the rails were tightly stretched wire and there were nothing but air beneath them.
So many cars, so many passages. For you, there may be the dangerous passage of puberty, the wind hot and wild in your hair, followed by marriage, during which for a while you walk lightly under an infinite blue sky, then the rushing warm air of the birth of your first child. And then so soon, it seems, a door slams shut behind you, and you find yourself out in the cold where you learn that the first of your parents has died.
But the next car is warm and bright, and you take a deep breath and unbutton your coat and wipe your glasses. People on either side, so generous with their friendship, turn up their faces to you, and you warm your hands in theirs. Some of them stand and grip your shoulders in their strong fingers, and you gladly accept their embraces, though you may not know them well. How young you feel in their arms.
And so it goes, car after car, passage to passage. As you make your way forward, the roadbed seems to grow more irregular under the wheels as you walk along. ‘Poor workmanship,’ you think, and to steady yourself, you put your hands on people’s shoulders. So much of the world, colorful as flying leaves, clatters past beyond the windows while you try to be attentive to those you move among, maybe stopping to help someone up from their seat, maybe pausing to tell a stranger about something you saw in one of the cars through which you passed. Was it just yesterday or the day before? Could it have been a week ago, a month ago, perhaps a year?
The locomotive is up ahead somewhere, and you hope to have a minute’s talk with the engineer, just a minute to ask a few questions of him. You’re pretty sure he’ll be wearing a striped cap and have his red bandana around his neck, badges of his authority, and he’ll have his elbow crooked on the sill of the open window. How impassively he will be gazing at the passing world, as if he’s seen it all before. He knows just where the tracks will take us as they narrow and narrow and narrow ahead to the point where they seem to join.
But there are still so many cars ahead, and the next and the next and the next clatter to clatter to clatter. And we close the door against the wind and find a new year, a club car brightly lit, fresh flowers in vases on the tables, green meadows beyond the windows and lots of people who together — stranger, acquaintance and friend — turn toward you and, smiling broadly, lift their glasses.”
Ready to step into the club car, I am grateful. There you are, waiting for me, glasses raised. Thank you.
Happy New Year.
yvonne
So fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be with you all
Over beers and banter, we 
