A CORONA FOR BRUNCH

Is it a spontaneously developed killer contagion or a secret deep-state created insurrection?  No, I am not talking about the liberal illuminati, QAnon, Sorcha Faal’s version of the NWO or the advent of Peter Lemongello?  I’m of course talking about Covid 19.  And whatever your beliefs are about it, I think everyone from an anti-mask flat-Earther to a front-line John Hopkins trained epidemiologist, would all agree, the corona-virus has been responsible for messing up a shitload of crap this year.

As we all plod through this uncharted mess, I personally worry the most about everyone’s health, especially that of loved ones like my parents, whose current geographical location, age and medical conditions makes them particularly susceptible to the pandemic’s pernicious punch. Most assuredly I’m also concerned about overall societal well-being and the financial distress it has caused.  But if I may, I would like to spend the next few paragraphs on a less discussed side effect of the current crisis that is of the utmost concern to me. The current inconveniences concerning my Sunday brunch.

Scoff as you will, until we crashed headfirst into this Covid wall, my wife and I had a nice little near 20-year routine going. Most Sundays I would get up ridiculously early to play on the computer, read, or just enjoy some quiet time. A few hours later, at a far saner mid-morning hour, my wife would roll out of bed and groggily wander across the house to be near me. Having been up for a while, I’d impatiently try to wait long enough to inquire when she might want to venture out for brunch.  About 50% of the time I was too early, so her half-asleep replies tended to be an absolutely definitive vague rough idea version of ‘later-ish’.  The other 50% of the time, I held off long enough to get a pretty alert straight answer. Unfortunately, 100% of the time I could see the horrific disgust in her tired eyes, as she dealt with the ugly reality of being married to a wide-awake morning person.

Even on those pre-brunch Sunday mornings when I became an overly anxious noodge, I’ve consistently balked at being called a morning person. When I’ve objected, my wife has typically responded with either a silent ‘you’re going to debate something this obvious’ glare or a drolly delivered quiz like “are you up?, are you alert?, are you active?, are you happy?, is it morning?… you’re a morning person.”

From my standpoint, I think the more accurate way to describe me is to say I dislike sleep. When left to my own accord, I stay up late and get up early.  Luckily, I function fine on just a few hours of shuteye. The fact humans require sleep at all, seems like a horrible design flaw; what a poor use of the precious little time we have on the planet. Not that I am doing anything so Earth-shatteringly important with my time, but that’s not the point.

Most healthy-ish humans sleep a total of about 230,000 hours. That is like 9,600 days or 315 months or 26 years spent sleeping. That puts Rip Van Winkle to shame. Over a third of an average lifetime is spent just laying around with your eyes closed doing nothing. Sleeping seems like such a total waste, except maybe for the miserable hours I spent napping while trapped in boring Mr. Canning’s Junior High U.S. History class. I mean, besides this miserable plague-ridden year, sleeping through his Manifest Destiny lectures was about the only time in my life I would have rather been asleep than awake. 

Tell me on your deathbed looking back, you would not have rather spent an additional 26 years sharing time with your loved ones or playing, singing, dancing, learning, living it up, drinking a beer, making love or even just sitting around watching the extended director’s cut of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy?  Okay, I am not sure 230,000 hours is enough time to do that last one.

But I’m drifting off topic and since we don’t have that 230,000 extra hours to play with, I better get to my point.

I loved my pre-Covid 19 Sundays with my wife. Usually it was the only full day we had to just enjoy each other’s company.  After she got up, we would have a nice meal out, run our errands de jour, then either work on some house projects or just relax together. Okay, describing it now, it sounds a bit lame and whipped, like Will Farrell in Old School explaining to a group of partying college kids why he can’t stay up all night drinking with them: “I got a big day tomorrow… Well, actually a pretty nice little Saturday, we’re going to go to Home Depot. Yeah, buy some wallpaper, maybe get some flooring, stuff like that. Maybe Bed, Bath, & Beyond, I don’t know, I don’t know if we’ll have enough time.”    

But our Sundays were like that and I really treasured them. In our current Corona-virus quarantine-ish world, we don’t go out for brunch anymore and most errands have been replaced by the mountain of delivered boxes emblazoned with the disturbingly phallic Amazon logo (sorry, you can’t unsee it).  Even with both of us working from home we still look forward to our Sundays with each other, but it’s not the same. I really miss going out. But with as horrible as some other folks have had it this year, I feel funny talking about such a trivial inconvenience.

Early in the quarantine, my wife and I decided that we would try to keep Sunday brunch special. We prepared nicer meals and ate at the dining room table looking out the big front window, without phones, TV or other distractions. After a few weeks we ran through all our usual breakfast favorites and eventually the meal turned into the usual substance snarfing on the sofa in front of the tube.

Hoping to keep the weekend special, scrubbed, masked and soggy from a few dozen squirts of hand sanitizer, I ventured out one morning to pick up curb-side take-out from our most frequented brunch spot. It’s an overpriced quaint-ish faux-French cafe with average service and spotty consistency. (I sell it well, hard to believe I was one time in the advertising biz, eh?)  I know it sounds bad but more often than not, it was still pretty good. I guess going there was a hard habit to break because we’ve been brunching there about once a month since the first weekend we spent together.

We should have known better, but unfortunately, our usual breakfast order was not good to-go. Dropping 11 bucks for scrambled eggs, a couple of strips of bacon, a croissant and unlimited refills of coffee is fine when you’re paying for fresh hot food served to your table in a pleasant atmosphere with fun people watching.  It’s a complete waste of money for a Styrofoam container of cold congealing eggs, squashed bread, sad bacon and lukewarm coffee.  The next week we had much better luck getting take-out brunch from our favorite quiche place. Although the food was fantastic and reheated perfectly, after having the same meal three weekends in a month, we needed a break.

I think the brunch spots we miss the most are our poofy soufflé place and the bustling Dim Sum restaurant with it’s carts of tempting little treats chaotically pushed through the tightly packed crowded tables. But who knows when they will re-open.  We have tried to adapt to life without going out to brunch and recently we found a nice alternative. A couple of Sundays we have picked up treats from Starbucks’ drive-thru and had an in-car picnic parked under a tree at a nearby park with the convertible top down. It got us out of the house and allowed us a safe socially-distanced vantage point to watch the many strollers, joggers and dog walkers go by.

In an effort to support our favorite local restaurants, we have been eating take-out dinner a few nights a week since this all started, but recreating our special brunches has been trickier to navigate. Sooner or later we will try outside dining at a restaurant but with Covid cases steadily rising locally, we have not found a place we feel comfortable.  I have no doubt we will get through it all, although I knew things had taken a disturbing turn last Sunday when I actually slept in. I got up almost three hours later than usual… 8:30. Okay, maybe my wife’s right and I am a morning person.