The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Down at the Mabana Sunset Villa, our premier assisted living complex here on the aging South End, the Covid Lockdowns come along practically once a month. Help is pretty hard to find at the Villa, not just because pay is low and benefits are non-existent, but Covid has taken its toll on morale. Visitors are required to wear masks but we have plenty of folks who think — and I use the phrase loosely — that the Pandemic is a hoax, Fauci is a liar, vaccines are a government plot or … well, hell if I know what they’re thinking.

So inevitably the Villa has someone roll in, tests positive and the place goes into quarantine. After all, these are the folks with ‘underlying conditions’. If they die, of course, the anti-vaxxers will say they didn’t die of Covid, they died of underlying conditions. It’s like pushing someone off a cliff and saying, well, it wasn’t the shove that did them in, it was hitting the bottom. That, or some will say the vaccine they took killed them. So much for polio or smallpox vaccines these naysayers took as kids, lucky they’re alive, these yahoos.

My friend Janet works at the Villa. Over our weekly coffee together she unloads her frustrations. “We got residents who can’t see their kids or relatives or friends. Nobody but us when the Lockdown goes into effect. Half the time we’re in quarantine. Some putz on the staff who thinks Covid is phony baloney rolls in, tests positive, then here we go again. I can’t imagine working in a hospital anymore.”

Janet and I worked at the old Everett General Hospital, before Providence absorbed it. I was an orderly and she was nurse’s aide, what we never refer to as the ‘good old days’. But compared to what must be going on now, maybe they were.

“Strange times,” I say before we usually refill our cups. “Sad times,” she says, pouring the last of hers down the sink. I want to add something comforting, maybe even optimistic. Damn if I can think of a thing.

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