Quarantine diary. Part one: Getting started

I’m past the 40th day of quarantine, so it’s time to let me off this boat, right? That’s my understanding of how quarantine worked in medieval Venice. And we are in medieval Venice, correct? Untethered from all routine activities my space-time continuum is thoroughly jumbled.  If I'm going to stay on board for a while longer, I suppose it’s time for a retrospective. Meals. That’s all that really happens, anyway. The kids forget math and I type on the front porch until it’s time to cook something. Durham’s tiniest dogs and jankiest cars parade past my house at slow intervals. The middle class is at home. The working class is still rolling. Kids and chihuahuas seem to be loving life. 

It’s easy to pinpoint when my quarantine started. The day before I’d worked a wine lunch/dinner double at Mission Pizza in Winston-Salem. It was delightfully the opposite of quarantine. Family-style pastas and desserts, me pouring and passing around gallons of beer and wine, an old-fashioned social gathering. My family attended. We ate things with our hands. 

On Tuesday March 10th I felt the first pangs of panic. Of course we had been talking pandemic for a month. I’d spent most of the preceding weeks in a car travelling around the state with various visiting Italian winemakers. Things were already pretty bad in their country, but oftentimes the winemakers had departed Italy before what was about to happen became apparent. 

I’m at the Li Ming grocery store. I’m buying restaurant-sized bags of beans and rice, and any shelf stable items that I could imagine craving in isolation. Dashi. A bag of dried sweet potato pieces that look like candied apricots. Cans of pre-made congee. Don’t ask why, pandemic belly obeys its own rules. I’ve had congee maybe three times in 45 years. What am I going to do with cooked dried pork product? It looks and sounds like it would make every meal better. I could eat it as a bar snack. It probably has the consistency of Triscuits. 

ching yeh pork sung.

Parker and Otis grocery bag

I’m very proud of the four stacks of mostly library books that threaten to collapse my side table, to fall with the fury of Babel upon any small mammal brushing past. So many words, so many frequently passed-over scholarly volumes on topics like neuroscience and motherhood and totalitarianism. I guess I own these now. If the quarantine goes on for 40 years, a couple of these titles would stay undisturbed. I’m reading more than ever before. This is still a lifetime supply. 

I’m not done shopping. I spend a day’s wages on canned sardines from Portugal, pickled eggs, and fancy grits. Staples of bourgeois binge eating. Time to order some XL polo shirts in a rainbow of pastels. Before “Coronavirus 15” was first uttered, I knew where this heady mix of fear, stress, and isolation was headed: into the depths of my earliest memories, trawling for comfort foods. To fictionalized southern buffets where I’m allowed to gorge on starch and fat till gnawing anxiety is suffocated in a second helping of sea island peas. 

At least there are books.

Panic at the liquor store.

It dawns on me. We are going to need booze. A lot. Kids will be here. We may not have jobs. I bought a six-month supply of gin, tequila, and bourbon. We’ve been back twice. My Ides of March cocktail was tasty and showed the high spirits of early quarantine. Lemon, excellent white vermouth, so-so Gin. It tasted of unsullied optimism, and spring.

The warehouse is starting to look empty.

I got a freak-out headstart courtesy of phone calls and emails that started arriving from our winemaking friends in Italy around March 1st. By March 16th I was in the depths of it, though strangely I still believed we’d be out the other side of the quarantine by now. So I was still an optimist? By mid-March Francis from Vallana was using his children in the cellar because none of his workers (or his sister, whose home is in the stricken bordering region Lombardy) could risk public transportation to label bottles and stack pallets for us. What work would my children be able to accomplish? They are excellent builders on Minecraft. The pyramids of dirty laundry in my adolescent daughter’s room are a precise reproduction of Egypt’s valley of the kings. Maybe this crisis would knit us into a unit: the family that sells wine together, stays sane together. 

The president is going to say something crazy about stopping cargo ships from Europe (and then walk it back) and for a few hours I’m going to lose my mind. We don’t have enough wine! If any semblance of an economy survives this viral onslaught, PWI is still F-ED because I was lackadaisical about ordering through a bustling, boom-time winter 2020. And it’s too late to get into the toilet paper/sanitizer game. I guess I can turn the warehouse into a socially distant roller derby, or a racetrack for remote control cars. Indoor drone racing. That’s the ticket. We have high ceilings. It’ll be something for fans to watch now the NBA is gone. 

In the regular gloom of winter I started goading Mandy to start a casserole Instagram account, to give deserved attention to the signature cuisine of her native Wisconsin. In the same way that I want there to be a pork rind blog showcasing the diversity and complexity of pig skins made crispy in eastern N.C. and beyond, I hoped to learn about the warming, belly-generating dishes of the upper midwest. Happiness to be a shepherd through dark times. I mean winter: there’s not much light. Short days. By the time Mandy unveiled this masterpiece the darkness was figurative and yet more real. Tater tot casserole is still up to the task. Thousands of people are sick and dying. When I see this picture it still makes me happy. 

Mandy’s tater tot casserole.

ham

Child labor at Vallana

Oh thank god there is pasta. It arrived. Paolo Petrilli’s pallets of short shaped pastas and whole tomatoes broke the fake embargo. We won’t starve. Though we will have to wait until April 24th for long noodles. 

Let it be known that on March 20th I broke quarantine to buy a whole country ham from the Red & White on Roxboro St. I couldn’t believe they still had this staple of frontier life in stock. Also I bought a new mop, which was a prescient purchase. There would be plenty of time to mop. You may ask what one man and one family going to do with a whole pig’s leg. Oh you’ll see. If pictures had calories, my iphone from March 20-now would be +10 at least. 

Let’s wrap it up for today, I’m distracted by ham: there might still be some in the freezer. Many food photos will follow, watch this space. We’ll get around to talking about wine eventually. 

more pasta