San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
ON THE COVER
As regular routines have disappeared, Bay Area residents find new possibilities have opened
Family affairs: Four generations on the steps of Theresa Vella’s home in S.F., from top: Celina Gomes’ grandmother Theresa Vella; son Walt Sutton, 10; mother Mary Gomes; Celina Gomes’ daughter Naima Sutton, 8; and brother Dominic Gomes.
“It’s making us feel close with family that’s all over the world.”
Celina Gomes
A few weeks into the shelterinplace order, a house on 29th Street in Noe Valley began hanging cheesy jokes in the front window. First, the setup appeared on a handwritten poster.
What do you call a group of rabbits walking away?
A day or two later, the punchline would follow.
A receding hare line.
Dog walkers, stroller pushers, joggers moving at a gentle pace all smiled and groaned a little as they passed by. Soon, another home joined in with its own silly puns and payoff guesses, a slowmotion comedy show playing out across a quiet San Francisco street.
The coronavirus pandemic has emptied offices, locked schools, cleared BART trains and left coyotes howling on city blocks. We now eye 6foot gaps as we pass on the sidewalk and toast friends from the safety of computer screens. Attending a concert seems unthinkable. Even the grocery store breeds anxiety.
But in forcing us apart, the virus has also pushed us closer together. Blended families have strengthened relationships. Parents have embraced (and endured) extra time with kids. Communities have reached out to their most vulnerable members. People have turned windows into canvases to give strangers a chuckle. Adapting to this awkward new normal has been messy and emotional, full of real panic and true grief, but isolated at home over the past six weeks, we’ve grown more connected than ever.
Curtis Bradford has been sheltering in place in his singleroom occupancy apartment in the Tenderloin since before public health leaders made it official. He’s immunocompromised and at high risk of complications from the new coronavirus, so he locked down early, sent his dog to live with friends and hasn’t left his room in weeks.
To stay in touch, the community organizer launched the Tenderloin Zoom Network. Daily virtual programming ranges from morning meditations to computer programming workshops to sessions on how to stretch the products in your pantry. On Mondays, people sign in just to say hi, trade popsiclestick jokes and check on their neighbors.
“I love how our Tenderloin neighborhood has come together to look out for each other through this,” Bradford says. “Of course, that’s what the TL always does.”
For many people, the coronavirus pandemic has been primarily a family experience.
When Elisabeth Schriber describes her family, it evokes the opening credits of “The Brady Bunch.” There’s Schriber and her twin 12yearold sons, August and Leo. There’s Schriber’s ex and the boys’ other mother, Heather, and her partner, Carrie. There’s Schriber’s girlfriend, Judith and, her two teenage daughters. And there’s Schriber’s animal entourage: an elderly golden retriever, a pair of rabbits and an achingly cute corgi puppy named Peby.
Schriber calls the whole clan her “germ circle” — a blended family spread over three houses in the Mission, Noe Valley and Excelsior neighborhoods.
With any divorce there are disagreements over parenting styles and difficulties stitching together relationships, but when the coronavirus pandemic “For some reason, this has kind of been seamless. It has brought us all closer together as a blended family.”
Elisabeth Schriber
swept away regular routines, it took the friction, too.
“For some reason, this has kind of been seamless,” Schriber says. “It has brought us all closer together as a blended family.”
Heather has stepped up to help with daytime classes, and Schriber and her sons have launched new traditions, like cooking a big breakfast on Friday mornings. They plan the menu the night before, then feast on omelets, bacon and avocado toast.
“Typically breakfast here is Honey Nut Cheerios,” Schriber says, but the new weekday brunch is a bright spot amid all the uncertainty, as is Peby the puppy. One evening last week, the boys decided to put her in the shower. The bath was a disaster, but downstairs doing dishes, Schriber could hear the commotion above. Her sons laughed so hard the house shook.
Why should you go to a baseball game on a hot day? All the fans.
For health care professionals on the front lines of the pandemic, kids have been a release valve from the stress of treating patients with COVID19. But protecting family members from exposure has been a source of anxiety, too.
Medical workers have developed elaborate disinfection routines in the hope of not bringing the virus home. They’ve checked into hotel rooms to reduce the risk to spouses and sent children to stay with family to keep them safe. They’ve had the hard conversations about what happens if, and then what happens after that. And they’ve gone to work every day to care for their patients, then done everything in their power to protect the people they care about most.
When the curve of coronavirus infections began climbing in the Bay Area, Celina Gomes raised her hand. Gomes runs an inhome day care in Daly City, where she lives with four generations of her Maltese family across three houses in a row. Her brother is on one side; Gomes, her mother and two kids are on the other; in the middle lives Nanna, her 87yearold grandmother.
Usually, Gomes defers to her elders, but this time she took the lead.
“This may feel weird, but I’m in charge now,” she told her mom. No more trips to the grocery store. No more chatting outside with the folks next door. The priority was simple: keeping Nanna healthy.
“We all take turns,” Gomes says of how the clan has cared for each other through her divorce four years ago and her father’s death when she was 12. The coronavirus has been opportunity to reciprocate that support. “It’s just my turn.”
During the shutdown, the tightknit family has drawn even closer. They’re spending days in the backyard, eating meals together. Gomes’ son prays with Nanna every night. The independent octogenarian has embraced online church services. On Easter Sunday, she watched the live stream from her home village in Malta.
“The priest is her best friend’s cousin,” Gomes laughs.
As the coronavirus has isolated the family in Daly City, it has also connected them with relatives abroad in Canada, Australia, Malta and Scotland. This year, everyone has the same story, a common battle against COVID19.
“It’s making us feel close with family that’s all over the world,” Gomes says.
How do you know a snail is lying?
He says he isn’t home.
Chris Koenig has spent the lockdown juggling work and child care, swinging between appreciation and frustration like so many parents of young children.
Before the pandemic, Koenig commuted into the city from San Rafael. Some days he spent three hours in the car. “I leave early. I come home late,” he says. Now, his schedule is roughly the opposite. “I’m just here and have all this time” with the kids.
Koenig’s wife is an essential worker, a medical assistant at a Marin Health pediatric clinic, so he’s on duty at home: entertaining Arlo, 3, (until his day care reopened last week), helping Owen, 7, with schoolwork, making business calls and feeling generally unable to devote his full attention to work or family.
“You’re bouncing back and forth from a Zoom meeting to a math lesson to a call with a teacher,” Koenig says. “You kind of feel like you’re not doing anything well.”
It’s easy to get lost in the stress of a world turned upside down by the virus, but between the moments of selfcriticism, Koenig says the shutdown has been a bonding experience with his sons. There are morning bike rides to drop Arlo at day care and hikes on Terra Linda trails with Owen, inventing educational activities as they explore. In the quiet spaces between emotional breakdowns and recoveries, Koenig’s able to marvel at where the boys are in their development, to be grateful for the time together.
“If I fast forward to a happier, more healthy time for everyone,” Koenig says, “I’ll look back at this time like a second sort of paternity leave that I got years later.”
He’s eager for the rate of infection to fall, for the Bay Area to reopen, for life to gradually resume its normal rhythm. But even as Koenig anticipates that day down the hopefullynottoodistant road, he knows there are pieces of the shutdown he’ll miss.
Like the recurring game of catch that he and Owen have started playing every day. It’s a luxury that work schedules usually don’t allow, but over the last month and a half, Koenig has watched his son absorb the mechanics of throwing and catching a baseball. Bit by bit, he’s getting the hang of it.