With martini and pill dispenser in hand, I may survive this pandemic
No one has ever accused me of stylishness, but they would admit that in the past I achieved a level of kemptness that separates me from a dirty old man.
I bathed daily, donned fresh shirts and socks each morning, and tried to find presentable slacks with a working fly. I shaved every day or so and received a skilled haircut from the magical Lara every three weeks, in the hope that the Jew-fro I sported in my twenties would not reappear.
Since mid-March I’ve discovered that my sartorial self-monitoring has tended to slip, along with my general discipline about work, exercise, appetite control, alcohol consumption and oral hygiene.
Since no one except my beloved Pamela and our semi-domesticated resident crows sees me, there’s no one else to notice my lapses.
Social distancing negates the need for keeping my odiferous exudations to a minimum and the crows live on decayed meat and offal, ensuring their halitosis is more lethal than mine. I’m not sure if Pamela agrees.
Pamela is unimpressed by the rigor I display in forbearing my martini until the evening news comes on at 5, as long as I’m sufficiently coordinated to dry the dishes without breaking any.
She pretends not to notice when I pour an extra shot of gin or eat several handfuls of almonds before dinner.
She tolerates my newfound habit of yelling at the politicians who flash across the screen, and occasionally finds my attempts to find new synonyms for poltroon, miscreant and less savory insults vaguely amusing, although she never joins in.
But the loss of my attention to detail bothers me. To ensure that I take all the medications that keep me on the right side of the sod, I purchased a pill dispenser that allows me to organize my medications by am and pm and day.
As long as I put the right pills in the proper compartments, this system should be foolproof. If it works for my 90-year-old neighbor, it should work for me. She swears by its efficacy and claims not to have missed a dose in years.
You can imagine my chagrin when I glanced at the gizmo at the end of last week and saw that the pills from Tuesday morning and Thursday evening still lurked.
My most disturbing moments have come from realizing that I’d developed the ability of neglecting to slip on certain items of clothing that I’d usually regarded as part of the minimum for being fully dressed.
First, I glanced at my feet before bedtime and realized I lacked socks, and had been trotting around the house barefooted, using my feet to polish the hardwood floors. The dirt I picked up going into the garage had transferred first to my soles before leaving streaks in the living room and my study.
Occasionally, I find myself wearing the same underwear two days in a row, which Pamela frowns upon. She grew up under her grandmother’s dictum that you should always wear clean underwear in case you’re ever unexpectedly carted off to the hospital.
My other major worry concerns my hair, which has begun to stick out in discrete tufts with no apparent design. It does not resolve into any discernible part nor take on a recognizable shape.
When I see myself in the mirror, which I tend to assiduously avoid, the reflection frightens me because of the resemblance the image bears to my somewhat addled grandfather.
I hope when this all ends, and my major focus diverges from washing my hands a few dozen times a day to adopting a more regular grooming pattern, my general orderliness will return. I’ll also cease worrying that the crows’ disapprove of my slovenliness.
They’ve taken up dropping the suet we put out for them in the general direction of my head, assuming that my appetites derive from my feral appearance.
Stuart Grover is a Tacoma resident and former News Tribune reader columnist. He holds a doctorate in history and can be reached at sgrover@harbornet.com