Coping with coronavirus: Making do
Public is adapting to pandemic, and Googling ‘bidet’
Editor’s note: In the drumbeat of heavy headlines, “Coping with coronavirus” is an occasional feature offering smaller bites, including slice-o-life moments barely imaginable just a short time ago. We want to hear from you — the cooped-up-going-stir-crazy masses. Changes. Challenges. Chatter. Email tips@pilotonline.com. Let us know your message is for “Coping with coronavirus.”
Crazy times. Every state in the U.S. is under a disaster declaration, for the first time in our nation’s history. Toilet paper has become the most thoughtful of gifts. Handshakes are out. Masks are in, even at the bank. And a new language is upon the land. Flatten the curve. PPE. Contactless delivery.
Hampton Roads is dealing. Making do or doing without. And Googling “bidet.”
Donna Luzzi says her husband of 39 years is a man of many talents. But let him cut her hair? Are you nuts?
Trouble is, with salons closed for weeks now, Luzzi says her thick, short hair was beginning to look like a “helmet.”
“He kept telling me he’d cut it,” Luzzi said of her husband, retired Navy dentist Ray Kielt, “and I finally gave in.”
On the deck of their house in Great Neck’s Layden Cove, Kielt started snipping at his wife’s hair while she held up a mirror, watching and wincing.
It was the first haircut he’d ever given anyone.
“Talk about stressful,” Luzzi said. “We both should have taken tranquilizers. I was afraid I’d have to shave my head when he was done with me.”
But they discovered that Kielt can give a decent cut. Or at least one that will do until the pros return to work.
On Wednesday, Gov. Ralph Northam extended his order for non-essential businesses, keeping salons shuttered until at least May 8.
Luzzi says she’s just glad she embraced her gray long ago.
Last week, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said hair color is now flying off store shelves.
Speaking of bare shelves: Why, why, WHY is toilet paper still so hard to find?
It’s a frustrating and enduring footnote of the pandemic. Yes, there have been kinks in supply lines. However, 90% of TP used in the U.S. is made domestically, and producers say they’re cranking out as much as always and expect to continue.
Even though TP isn’t lifesustaining, it’s clearly one of those items we really — make that really — don’t want to be without.
We’ve done this before — several times, in reaction to real and imagined crises.
One was in the early 1970s when a pulp paper shortage led a congressman to express concerns that it could threaten toilet paper supplies. “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson included that in his late-night monologue, which led to panic-buying.
Today’s scramble could finally cause the U.S. to break its 34million-roll-per-day habit. According to Bloomberg News, online searches for “bidet” skyrocketed last month.
Popular in other parts of the world, bidets have long been eyed as somewhat scandalous by Americans, who associated them with the European brothels visited by soldiers during World War II.
I now know what it’s like to be hunted.
Every night and every day.
The world provides ample hunting grounds.
Everyone is prey.
That’s the beginning of a poem from Virginia Beach resident Angela Bohon, who found it therapeutic to channel worry into creative writing.
“I was waking up at night with these anxious thoughts, especially in the beginning of all this,” said Bohon, who’s holed up at home in Red Mill with two kids.
Turning those thoughts into poetry “helped me,” she said.
Sue Perna, an artist from Carrollton, went another route — building a 3D model of the spiky coronavirus cell responsible for COVID-19.
It “needed to be replicated in a completely innocuous form,” she said in an email to the paper.
Pena didn’t go for fancy — basically shoving some wooden dowels into a wool dryer ball and adding some finish.
But: “Funnily enough,” she wrote, “having a COVID cell sitting on a table nearby calms me, tamps down the fear provoked by the real cell.”
While air quality has improved since shutdowns cut worldwide emissions, cities across the country — San Francisco, Chicago, Washington — are experiencing an unforeseen type of littering:
Disposable gloves and masks, tossed by people who’ve heeded advice to wear protection in public but don’t want to contaminate their cars.
More than unsightly, such coronavirus trash could get into waterways, block storm drains or potentially infect cleanup workers.
In Virginia, littering can fetch a $2,500 fine or up to a year in jail.
And authorities from California to Canada are considering upping their littering penalties when it comes to discarding PPE on the ground.
Last week found B.J. Taylor digging through her closets in Norfolk’s Talbot Park, searching for wrapping or construction paper to cut into colorful heart shapes.
She’d read about how hearts have come to symbolize a thank you to front-line workers — displayed like bat-signals in the windows of folks isolating at home.
Taylor, a semi-retired management consultant, worked with nonprofits and small- to midsized businesses before the pandemic closed their doors.
“So I understand the power of building community,” she said, “and what it can mean to somebody to simply be thanked.”
Taylor made hearts for her own house, then kept cutting, handing them out or dropping them off on random porches with a note of explanation.
Now, when she sees those hearts hung in those windows, it feels like she contributed something tangible.
“I can’t save a life except by staying home,” she said, “but the health care workers, the police, the firefighters, they’re out there doing it — literally — every day. And they’re our neighbors. We need to be thanking them.”