Today's prompt comes from journalist Lizzie Presser.
Prompt: Call someone you haven’t spoken to in some time. Ask what their days and weeks of isolation, or essential work have been like. What is a moment that has been significant for them in recent weeks? Try to understand why that moment in particular. What did it show them about themselves or their families or their coworkers? How did an emotion—a first gut response, like anger—evolve and reveal itself to be something else altogether, like fear?
Then, write a journal entry inspired by that conversation. Explore what stepping out of your own experience and into someone else’s brought up, maybe even clarified, for you. What was unexpected? Did it evoke a significant moment from your own life over these past weeks? How has your understanding of that moment changed?
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Iowa screens her calls. It's a point of pride that she always picks up for me. Iowa is my grandmother. She's 86.
She answers on the third ring. "Good morning. How are you?"
"I'm alright, just walking Charlie. How are you?"
"I just came upstairs to get dressed. Ready for another miserable day."
And so it goes. Iowa doesn't sugarcoat things. She's not a butterscotch candies in her purse kind of grandmother.
We talk about her food supply. It's adequate. She hasn't gone out in weeks, but she keeps threatening to go to ShopRite during the high-risk hour to look for alternatives to all the items the Instacart buyer couldn't find. She has a list of grievances. It is long and detailed.
We talk about her sources of entertainment now that the library is closed. She's re-reading books she read decades ago. She regrets giving away most of her puzzles to the water conditioner repair man. Why did she do that? His wife likes puzzles. I don't ask how she knows that.
I ask her if her parents, born just before the turn of the 20th century, ever talked about the Spanish Flu. They were living in or near Philadelphia in 1918, where the disease was especially devastating.
"We didn't really talk with my parents when we were kids."
"So they never mentioned it? It never came up in conversation, say at the dinner table?"
"No. There was one time my brother Phil, who was quite a bit older than me, threw up on his plate and my father made him eat it."
"Well I guess if there was ever a time to talk about the Spanish Flu at the dinner table, that would have been it..."
It's hard to think about her alone and vulnerable in her big old drafty house, drifting from room to room like a ghost in her cloud of Marlboro smoke. Her world was already small and isolated, and now, this. Aside from doctors, she had three spaces she could look forward to complaining about visiting: ShopRite, the library, and Heritage's to buy cigarettes by the carton.
"I don't think anything will ever be the same," she says. "Even after the vaccine."
"Will you get the vaccine?"
"No."
"No?"
"I probably won't even be alive by then."
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