Send in the Clowns

A Sanctimonious Diatribe from a Crotchety Curmudgeon Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

We are now seventeen days into our self-exile, err.. isolation. We actually started on Friday the 13th, two days before the California governor told us to. That doesn’t make us special or anything. What it makes us is overly cautious. After all, we are in that at risk group of elderly people who are over sixty years old. We did drive once to a mailbox to mail two letters and we have now taken two walks around the block. It rained every day of the first week of exile so we couldn’t walk then. I should add that to walk around our block is roughly a mile so we are not walking just four midwest blocks.

As we walk, if we see someone coming from a distance, we either turn around or cross the street in order to keep our safe distance of at least twelve feet. My wife explained to me why six feet was chosen. I didn’t like the physics they used in their calculation. If you add the wind factor, twelve feet is the minimum I would want to be. My wife even walks twelve feet behind me in case I suddenly come down with COVID-19 and cough.

The problem is that our block does have corners and sweeping turns that I can’t see around. So when we are coming to those I usually either move to the middle of the street (no one is driving right now) or we just cross the street to get a better view.

Well, this afternoon we came to one of those sweeping curves and I heard a dog barking. In our neighborhood a dog barking means that it is usually tied to a human and it (the dog, not the human) saw a squirrel, a rabbit, another dog, or a person they didn’t like. Hence, we immediately crossed the street. And was I glad we did.

A hundred yards in front of us on the other side of the street was, for lack of a better term, a Good Humor Truck. Actually it appeared to be a roach coach selling ice cream. I have heard this truck (they play some electronic version of Farmer in the Dell or some other annoying children’s song) in the neighborhood over the past few years but I have never actually laid eyes on it.

Now let me set this up a little more. California is in lockdown mode. Almost all businesses are closed. The restaurants that are open are either set up for delivery or pick-up only and with strict safety rules in place. The grocery stores and Costco have tape on the ground to keep people who are lined up to get in or to pay for their purchases at least six feet apart (which, as I said earlier should be at least twelve feet).

This ice cream roach coach had a lady and her dog at the window buying what I assume was ice cream. It is California and pot is legal so you never know. Surrounding the lady was a gaggle of children who I, at first, assumed were the lady’s since they all seemed to know each other and were all within two or three feet of each other. At the same time two little girls suddenly came out of their house carrying folding money in their hands and ran across the street without looking for cars and joined the gaggle. At about the same time, the lady with the dog walked nonchalantly away eating what looked like an ice cream cone. The kids were still all crowded around the truck, no adults were to be seen.

We, of course, were aghast and agog. Actually more aghast than agog. Mostly we were pissed. Since we were on the opposite side of the ice cream roach coach’s window, we could not see who was causing this neighborhood calamity. I have to assume that it was either the clown from It or the boogeyman. Honestly, it was probably some poor sap who was trying to make a living and either didn’t know what was happening in the world at the moment or really didn’t care and just wanted to be able to feed his family. I don’t blame the gaggled kids because they had been out of school for two weeks (the previous week was spring break) and they wanted to see their friends and grab a quick fix.  But what were their parents or guardians thinking?

I thought we lived in a sane neighborhood. There are college educated professionals in this hood –engineers, teachers, physicists, physicians, and perhaps a lawyer or two have snuck in. But surely, since even these folks are working from home they must know what is going on. I also have to make the bold assumption that the clown at the window was not wiping his counter down with bleach or alcohol after each person got their fix. We didn’t think of it at the time but we actually should have done the neighborhood a service and called the police.

While typing the above paragraphs, I looked out my office window and across the street from our house there was a mom and three children standing on the corner. All the kids looked to be under ten. They were talking to a lady in a car, which contained four people. The car had pulled over to the wrong side of the street to chat. Yes, the mom and the open car window seemed to be six feet apart but the little kids kept wandering closer to the open window. Then, a lady and her dog came down the sidewalk, crossed the street, and walked between the family of four and the car. There was a lot of room for her to have gone in a lot of directions to bypass this small gathering but she chose the straight line and went straight through! What a jackass!

The car and the family stayed there for quite a while. I looked up a bit later and now a young man had gotten out of the car, opened the trunk, and was pulling a set of bagpipes out. This gave me time to run and get my wife so that she could witness this as well. The young man, as bagpipe players will do, started playing the bagpipes while standing in the street apparently much to the delight of the three little kids and the amusement of their mom.

Once again, I would like to present a bit of physics. Bagpipes work by blowing air into a bag which is then squeezed to release the air out of various pipes. That means that air which would normally come out of a person’s lungs is now being expelled violently, not to mention noisily, into the air with an increased velocity. Six feet, twelve feet all be damned. I am glad that I was fifty feet away inside a closed house. Unfortunately, I could still hear the bagpipes.

Right after this occurred, my friend who lives in Lake County, Illinois, sent me an article saying that Lake Forest was becoming the number one hotspot in Lake County¹. The mayor of Lake Forest, George Pandaleon, said, "Frankly, I expected better from Lake Foresters…As a city we have a responsibility to do the right thing." He then said, "I personally, along with other members of the community, have witnessed many instances where social distancing is not being practiced. In our neighborhoods, at the beach, at the lakefront, and on the grounds of Deer Path golf course."

The article goes on to say: “Patti Corn, emergency response coordinator for the health department, said there were many reasons why some towns may have more confirmed coronavirus cases than another.

 ‘People who live in those communities may have greater access to testing than people who live in other areas of the county,’ Corn said. ‘People who live in those communities may also have traveled more to areas where there's a higher prevalence of COVID-19 that was occurring before Illinois was issued the stay-at-home order by our governor…There are likely to be literally hundreds of Lake Foresters who are carrying this virus, are contagious and do not know it because they have not developed any symptoms.’”

So why am I including this here? That’s easy. Lake Forest and Santa Barbara are similar, I assume, in demographics. As stated above, these people travel more. Also, educated, wealthy people are known to be cavalier. You know, “It can only happen to the ‘other’ people.” Hence, we have children gathered at Ice Cream Roach Coaches and bagpipe playing idiots parked on the wrong side of the street playing for a small family while dog walking ladies infringe on the currently required social distance. 

I was recently accused of being sanctimonious when I pointed out to a friend that going out into public was putting us all at risk. Maybe this whole diatribe is sanctimonious but I am very concerned. If you are not concerned and not thinking about each move you make that has any sort of contact with the world outside your house, then, personally, I think you are no better than Typhoid Mary².

To quote (out of context) Stephen Sondheim³:

But where are the clowns?

Quick, send in the clowns.

Don't bother they're here.

1.                   https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/hundreds-of-lake-foresters-likely-have-coronavirus-mayor-warns/ar-BB11LCeJ

2.                   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon

3.                   Stephen Sondheim, A Little Night Music, ‘Send in the Clowns’, 1973.