So Governor Abbott of Texas laid out a kinda, sorta plan today for Texas to return to the land of the living. He says the first steps will be for hospitals to resume other procedures and surgeries, for the state parks to re-open with social distancing and face masks, and for all businesses to be allowed to sell stuff via curbside deliveries and home deliveries. He also said that all of the schools will remain closed through the end of the school year. Then he made some very, very tentative suggestions about further “opening” up in May or even June, if all goes well between now and then.

I am interested to see how this all works out, but the guidelines and tentative plans don’t even begin to answer my personal burning questions, nor those of many others I know and love. I honestly don’t much care about state parks and curbside deliveries (that were already happening anyway). My questions are, again, more personal and harder to answer. When can I feel relatively safe about having my rather large family come to visit? When can I hug my grandchildren? And can I convince my adult children at some point that I’m willing, at age 62, to run the risk of contracting the virus? And if I am willing to run that risk, is my husband, who is 67 years old and has Parkinson’s? If my three adult children who live with me are called back to work, will/should they go–since the main reason they have stayed home is to protect me and Engineer Husband? Are the elderly (not that I usually apply that term to myself) and the immunocompromised expected to stay home until there’s a vaccine, which may very well be a year or more from now? Do we have any idea even now what the actual death rate among different age groups is for this “novel” virus? What percentage death rate is an acceptable risk, and what is unacceptable? These are questions that we are going to have to answer each one for ourselves. No president or governor will be able to make these decisions for us. And I am not looking forward to trying to decide these things for myself and to some extent for other people.

In other news, I have spent some of the time of coronavirus social distancing, like almost everyone else, watching television. I watched the series The English Game and thoroughly enjoyed it. If I told you it was about the history of competitive soccer in Britain, I feel that would sell the story short. So, instead I’ll say it’s a period piece by Julian Fellowes, the same producer who gave us Downton Abbey. And The English Game, although it’s no Downton Abbey, is a credit to the Fellowes brand. It tells a great story about working class players who began in the late nineteenth century to break into the game of football (soccer) which had been a game for the wealthy elite young men of Eton and Harrow and other British “public schools”.

I’m not sure how to end today’s coronavirus musings. I daresay you all have thought about these questions, too, as they relate to your own family and family situation. And I daresay you’ve spent some time watching TV or reading or doing something else to take your mind off the questions that really don’t have definitive answers right now—but must be answered eventually nevertheless.