Testimony of a Fruit Man

I left my job last week.

I was a deliveryman for the nation’s premier provider of cut fruit bouquets. You know the one. For the last few years, if you were in a specific part of upstate New York, you might have seen me delivering fruit bouquets to people’s homes, workplaces, weddings, schools—at all times of the year, for all kinds of occasions. And of course, recently, that meant delivering fruit bouquets during a pandemic.

If you’re like any of the sensible people I’ve mentioned this to, that might have made you pause. Maybe you’re wondering something like: didn’t New York close all non-essential businesses? How the hell are Consumable Presentations an essential service? You’d be right in asking, if you are. I was wondering the same thing when I was informed that we would, in fact, be staying open, only about twelve hours before the shelter-in-place order went into effect. I still have a hard time digesting it. The things I’d spent years delivering weren’t groceries. They weren’t meals. They were chocolate-covered, overpriced novelties, bought for the recipient’s sake less often than for the customer placing the delivery order, so they could feel content knowing they’d spent enough money to show they care.

But hell, you could eat them. Apparently, that’s essential enough.

Stick to the feeling!

Hi! I've literally never blogged. Nice to meet you.

Since April 1st I've been in a group where we've been posting one song a day; I realized quickly that I've sure been doing a lot of thinking (read: anxiety spiraling) since I started self-isolating, but I've been resisting feeling anything about this crisis. At first what came out was a jumble of banjo notes that relied on old tropes that don't reflect the seismic everything shift we're going through. And worst of all it didn't feel honest.

I Can't Stop Hand-Washing My Clothes

In times of great anxiety, I find comfort in the mechanical, the onerous. That is precisely what hand washing laundry is, a tiny manual labor of repetition—like kneading dough except the reward isn’t a steaming, delicious loaf, but the ability to wear your clothes without offending the noses of everyone else you live with.

For every crotch and armpit I scrub with a bar of unscented hotel soap, I am able to let go of something, if only temporarily. I am able to think less about my aunt, a pediatric pulmonologist who will certainly be affected by what is to come. I am able to think less about my roommate’s boyfriend, who works in the ICU, and the anxiety she must be feeling, though I know she hides it.