El amor en los tiempos del corona

"[. . . ] nobody teaches life anything."--Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 El amor en los tiempos del cholera. Do you know that book? In English, it's called Love in the Time of Cholera and it was written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of my all-time favorite writers. It's a convoluted love story, set against a cholera epidemic.

Some of that may sound familiar.

I was thinking of it the other day because Dave and I got married--again--on Saturday. It was a backyard wedding, in Kelly and Kevin's backyard (beautifully decorated by Kelly with flowers and calavera papel picado). Kelly and Kevin were our witnesses. Our friend Grace was the minister. Her wife Chris handled all the other roles, from best man/maid of honor to guest. The puppies were there, too, Lester and Olive. Lester wore a tie. Olive went au natural. And that was our little party.

Social distancing, you know.

We had BBQ for lunch and, since it was pi day, Kelly had gotten a cherry pie (and ice cream and whipped cream) and we had champagne with it, those of us who are drinking. We ate outside even it though it was almost too sunny and almost too chilly at the same time. It's March. At least it wasn't windy.

I sewed up some wedding favors for everyone, individualized face masks (not remotely useful for anything except keeping out dust and a tiny bit of the largest gobs of pollen). Kevin's had an bird. Kelly's a frog. Grace and Chris's had a Harry Potter theme. Dave's had bananas. Mine was cut from my all-time favorite fabric from a discontinued line called Treasure Hunt.

Why get married now? For insurance purposes. For legal purposes. For all the usual purposes. When Dave's job goes away, we'll need to have insurance and because we needed to have a "qualifying event" (death, marriage, birth, adoption, etc) to get insurance outside of the sign-up times. Getting a kitten wouldn't work, so we went for getting married. We got a license last week, but it turns out that we also needed to have a ceremony to make it legal. So we had a ceremony.

After dinner, we packed up the leftovers, hugged everyone (we're not so good at social distancing yet), thanked everyone for their help. I came home and got back into my pajamas and went back to bed. Got to start taking that social distancing thing seriously eventually, right?

I was lucky that I had the weekend off after a co-worker asked me to trade shifts with her. That was fortuitous and completely unplanned. I don't have to go back to work until Wednesday evening, when I have to take a five hour class--though already I'm fielding calls to come in for extra shifts this week. (I mean, I should, because soon enough our insurance premiums will have to come from my paycheck, but...not tonight, okay? I just need a couple more days of pajamas and Netflix.)

Now that it's official, I'm contemplating changing my last name to Dave's. He's got a nice, WASPy, white person name and it's not like anyone believes, despite my name, that I'm Latina anyway. (It's not just a recent change to pale, related to working graveyard shift; I've always been pale. One of my family's childhood nicknames for me was Gringa, a mildly derogatory term for a white girl. And even today most people eventually get around to asking me what my maiden name was, as they assume that I'm a white woman married to a Latino.) Despite the blue wave that's building behind Joe Biden, I have no doubt that trump and the russians are planning to keep trump in office and with brown babies in cages at the border and the ramping up of racism towards anyone not white, I want to be able to hide more easily in plain sight, something having a white person's name will allow me to do. I want to get a new passport with a white name that more closely matches my current vampiric complexion. I want there to be an escape route open for me if we have to run after the next election and when the duck-and-cover response has allowed the current viral plague to pass over us.

(It's not just these days, I'm afraid. Growing up in an abusive environment has produced a lot of interesting long-term effects. Hypervigilance, for example, the tendency to always be listening for danger. The ability to see an abusive situation from a mile away. Always looking for a way out.)

That is exhausting stuff to talk about. This is an exhausting time. Let's just make it through this and through the next thing and through the next thing. Let's just get this over with.