Even self-quarantining can have a good side to it

A hotbed of Coronavirus exposure

Seattle is a long way away from most parts of this country.

I have lived in 10 different states from coast to coast, and only once have I lived less than 1,100 miles from there.

I have been there three times, first in 1989 to cover a basketball game at UW, then for three weeks in 2009 for a summer vacation with Pauline and her family at Snoqualmie Pass and 10 days in December 2011 to meet our new grandson.


I also have a friend who lives there, although the only time we knew each other was in 1977, half a world away in Vienna, Austria. She had a summer internship at the American Embassy and I was over there for two years with my first wife.


Nancy and I became friends. We sat out in the evenings and talked politics in one of the last summers that America was still the America in which baby boomers came of age. Ronald Reagan would change everything in less than four years, but we didn't know that then.

When the summer ended, she went back home for her senior year at Washington State. I still had the better part of a year left in Austria and less than two years till my marriage started to die.

We never saw each other again, although I certainly thought about her at times during the 13 years I was a single man. I found out many years later that she and I were both in Colorado at the same time in the late '80s.

About 20 years ago, I started doing Google searches for all sorts of people I had known along the way. I was 50 years old, very happily married and living in Los Angeles. Then Facebook came along and I was "friends" with nearly everyone I ever knew except my first wife.

Nancy and I comment on each other's posts. We're still in roughly the same place politically, and both of us seem to know that life could always be worse.

We could be Republicans.

Seriously, though, I'm an old man of 70. A far cry from the 27-year-old who had all those conversations back when the world was young.

Nancy lives in Seattle, which looks more and more like Ground Zero for the Coronavirus. In fact, her mother was in the Life Care Center in Kirkland rehabbing a broken hip. That's one of the hotbeds of exposure to the virus, so she brought her mother home and started a 14-day self quarantine for the two of them while she helps her mother heal.

My own mother is 93 now and rarely leaves her house. I remember 10 years ago when Nicole and I moved from California to Georgia, she had to come two weeks later. So I went home to Virginia and spent two weeks with my mother. We both agreed later that it had been a rare experience to have that much time together at such a late age.

I think the idea of self-quarantining has the possibility of giving people some unexpectedly wonderful experiences.

In the end, most of us rarely have enough time to be with the people we love.

A silver lining.

Maybe.

At least we can hope so.