He missed his mom
Columnist sees his mother for first time since pandemic started.
Iflew 4,725 miles coast to coast last week during the coronavirus pandemic for a simple reason. missed my mom. And she missed me.
I had not seen her in nearly a year. I talk with her by phone every Sunday night, but there have been no Zoom or Skype video chats. She has never owned a computer or used the internet and she does not intend to start now. She will turn 89 in December and, although she is in good health, I did not want to wait another year to see her. My dad died three years ago at 88 and I am grateful for the quality time spent with him during visits out to Tacoma in his final years.
Of course, I was worried about COVID -19 and commercial airline travel. I was not cavalier about the risks.
I wrote in a previous column about the severe health problems I experienced in June that
required four days of hospitalization and initially stumped physicians with lung symptoms that mirrored COVID -19. After five negative tests for the novel coronavirus, I was diagnosed with bacterial pneumonia. Antibiotics worked quickly and I made a speedy and full recovery.
Would commercial airline travel put me at heightened risk for COVID -19? I read a lot of background material from many sources, including news articles and travel advisories from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and New York state. The most helpful I found was from the MIT Medical website, which noted: “At first thought, a narrow metal tube in which strangers are crammed together for hours might seem like a flying petri dish, especially during a pandemic ...While there are risks associated with flying, it may be safer than you think.” The MIT experts went on to note that “air quality in a commercial airliner is quite high, with the air volume in the cabin being completely refreshed every two to four minutes.” It talked about a commercial jet’s high-efficient particulate air filters, similar to those used in hospitals, that filter out 99.9 percent of virus-sized particles.
None of the sources said airline travel was without risks. I would mitigate them as much as I could. I was traveling to Washington state, where the reported cases of COVID -19 were considerably lower than New York state (outside New York City) in the past seven days and it was not on New York’s quarantine list. I also paid more to fly Delta out and Alaska back because they block out all middle seats, allowing for better social distancing. Not all airlines do that.
Also, I came armed with multiple high-quality face masks, disinfectant wipes, hand sanitizer and a reporter’s street savvy. Let me give you a brief snapshot of what I encountered. Overall, it felt like the safest, cleanest and friendliest plane flight I have ever made between Albany and Seattle in the past 39 years. It felt a little like a flight I took not long after 9/11, which also felt safer, more vigilant and at peak qualityassurance.
In the terminals, airline and TSA personnel all wear face coverings, latex gloves and are behind protective plexiglass dividers. Every other seat is taped off in the airport waiting area, making for a 6-foot spread between passengers. There were hand sanitizer stations every 50 yards. I did not see any passengers without a face mask. A couple cowboys and frat boys are still going with the bandana look, which is not smart. I saw a few people with full PPE, including plastic face shields and gloves. The TSA agent makes you pull down your mask when checking your driver’s license photo.
Passengers have never seemed kinder and gentler. Being wary has that effect, I suppose. There was no crowding at the security checkpoint, no puddling up in preboarding and no scrum for overhead bins. Both Delta and Alaska loaded from the back of the plane first, which always made more logical sense to me and even more so with COVID -19. Also, both flights I took were about 30 percent full, which meant no tussles for overhead bins. The planes get disinfected after each flight. They never felt or looked cleaner. The cabin crews were especially courteous and handed out hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes along with single-serve water, soda and bag of snack mix. No alcohol is served or allowed, except in firstclass. That’s a bad optic. I saw flight attendants tell passengers to pull their face mask over their nose if they were seen not wearing it properly. Nobody was allowed on the plane if they weren’t wearing a mask.
In Tacoma, just being able to hug my mom made it all worthwhile. We both wore masks. I tilted my head off to the side and held her close. She seems tinier every time I see her. She felt like a sparrow in my arms. I savored that hug.
The visit struck a deep chord of feeling grounded. I was like a salmon returning to its native stream.
As I jogged through Point Defiance Park, etched by sunlight filtering through a canopy of tall cedar and fir trees, I ran past tangled mounds of wild blackberry bushes. I was too late for blackberry season, a staple of childhood summers spent at our beach cabin on the Puget Sound. Most all the blackberries were gone, picked by people or eaten by birds and deer. The few overripe ones that clung to vines had mildewed after days of hard rain.
A favorite summer childhood memory was picking wild blackberries with my mom. I would bring a small bowl along with her large pail and we would hike the steep hillside behind the cabin where the hot August sun ripened the berries into thumb-sized marvels. We worked until our arms were scratched and fingers were stained a deep purple, like printer’s ink. My mom made delicious blackberry pies, cobbler and blackberry jam.
I had accepted the fact that I was not going to be able to savor any wild blackberries on this lateSeptember visit.
At the end of my run, I began a long, slow trudge up a steep roadway out of the park. Exhausted after 6 miles, I slowed to a shuffle and finally stopped to walk. Off to the left, I noticed a blackberry bush cascading over a wooden fence. I spied a few clusters of ripe berries.
I stepped in, pulled off a beautiful blackberry and popped it in my mouth. It was bursting with a sublimely sweet and tart flavor, a taste of the Pacific Northwest. Deep, happy remembrances of boyhood came flooding back with every gulp. Here was my madeleine de Proust. I wolfed down a couple handfuls. My hands were blotched with blackberry stains. I was in no hurry to wash them off.
▶ Paul Grondahl is the director of the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany and a former Times Union reporter. He can be reached at grondahlpaul@gmail.com