Dave's House II -- How I Survived the Pandemic

By David Silverbrand

Our world changed with COVID19, forcing many of us to live in isolation. Living alone with my two cats, I began to re-evaluate my life experience and what I have learned from it. I learned to re-discover the joy of loving those around me and sharing that love with others. This book, then, is an amusing and poignant narrative of my life and the lessons it has given to me.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098379896

Book preview

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© 2020 David Silverbrand. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover photograph by Ben Anderson

Edited by Josephine Lyon

ISBN: 978-1-09837-988-9

eBook: 978-1-09837-989-6

Dedicated to Jone Kosack,

Life Coach and Confidant

Contents

Introduction

Left Behind

Making the Most of the Pandemic -The Practice of Positivity

My Worry List

South of the Border

Othering

Beginning Journalist

The Peppered Radiator

Love on the Playground

Rarified Air

Where in the World is Charles?

Return to Haight-Ashbury

Summer in Europe

Live from Lompoc

Force-fed Maturity

A Journalist Blossoms

Driving the Ferrari

Rats on the Run, Wallabies on the Lam

A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle.

Taking on Water

My Name is Bond, James Bond.

I Did It My Way

Tiptoe Through the Tulips

And That’s the Way It Is.

D-Day At the Maine Festival

Sex For Sale

Interview with a Nazi

Presidential Friends

Dealing with the Devil

Going to the Dogs

Coming to Eureka

Inside the Dungeon

How Prison Prepared Me for the Pandemic

The Car Key and the Stove Bolt

Living the Fantasy

The Unraveling

Fast Track to Joy

Othering

Peter’s Story

Brotherly Correspondence

Troubling Signs Ahead

Life with a Gringo

Enduring Love

Thinking It Over

The Family Guy

Life in 16 mm

Nina’s Death

Life Alone

The End of Days – Film At 11.

Life Alone: Solitary Refinement

Tropical Storm

The Summer of 2019

Last Family Christmas

Some People Say I’m Crazy, But I’m Not The Only One

Vision in Kneeland

Facing the First Covid Case

What I Learned From Emily Dickinson

Last Visit?

The Uninvited Co-conspirator

Legacy of My Brothers

I’ll Call You My Father

Two Shots to Go

Zooming with My Brother

Epilogue

Introduction

What is your book about? the NPR radio host will ask me. About 200 pages, I will proudly reply. And so will begin my promotional tour for Dave’s House II: How I Survived the Pandemic.

It’s all I have to show for my pandemic odyssey - this, two Moderna jabs in the arm and a couple of stimulus checks. These are the musings of a mind cluttered with life experience and from a man with way too much free time.

In the months we spent on lockdown, my life was on autopilot while my marriage nosedived. Through it all, I relived those special moments, some poignant and some funny. I rediscovered the joy of loving every one I have ever known and those I hope to meet.

This book is a celebration of life and how I spent my time, instead of ingesting bleach. I would not trade away this COVID experience. It has made me happier, deeper and more forgiving. That is why I have decided to share these stories, for better or worse.

As an Arcata transient once told my students, I would rather be here than have Hep C. I would say the same for my own experiences, enriched through time like a festering compost pile.

Enjoy my stories. Since you have already paid for them, you might as well.

Left Behind

Butt Paste. That is what I was thinking about the day COVID struck. As we scurried around leaving work and locking down, we pondered life in isolation - no contact with the people we loved. We would worry about food supply, toilet paper and the air we breathed. If we survived at all, we would be changing the way we lived, vulnerable to lies, speculation, conspiracies and superstition.

I worried about Butt Paste, the brown, oily ointment used for diaper rash. I had left a tube of it in my work desk as I dashed out the door. Our company had ordered us to leave the building and wait for instructions. I had grabbed notebooks, papers - all the instruments of my craft as a TV journalist. I left behind the one thing I used to treat the rash in my pants. What if someone discovered that little red tube in my desk? I thought. My corporate world would know that I suffered from a sore butt. My shame was unfathomable.

What embarrassment I had suffered to find that medicine. I remembered whispering to the pharmacist, the young woman in the lab coat, I’ve got this burning and itching in my crotch, I said, hoping shoppers wouldn’t hear me. If they did, they would tell the world that Dave’s underwear was harboring strange microbes. The pharmacist ignored shoppers, advising me in a loud voice, Try sleeping with your legs open. What good could come of that anyway? I dashed out of the pharmacy to try somewhere else.

At another pharmacy, I found an old friend. My late partner Nina had previously hired him to repair her rental houses. Projects included painting walls and plugging rat holes. His specialty was treating mold and mildew left by marijuana growers. His tools, patience and a putty knife. Now he was managing a pharmacy, harnessing his fix-up skills to human body repair.

Try Boudreaux’s Butt Paste, he recommended, pointing to the baby supply aisle. There it was - the small, red tube with the baby picture and the promise of extra protection.

Why couldn’t they have called it something more benign? Why not ‘Corpse Flower?, I wondered."

Butt Paste became the lubricant of my life. No more burning sensation at my neighborhood house fire. That’s why I kept it handy with the tools of my trade - until the day the pandemic struck.

Making the Most of the Pandemic -

The Practice of Positivity

There is nothing like life on lockdown to change one’s view of the world. Robbed of everything we know – family gatherings, Super Bowl parties and even dining out, we are forced to become introspective. We have only the clothes on our back, the food in our pantry (when we can get it) and our own spirituality.

That spirituality has saved me. Having lost my companion of 20 years and been stricken with a life threatening heart disease, I’ve turned inward. I have rediscovered humor. Those motorized supermarket carts are no longer crutches - but rather fuel-injected race cars.

I gleefully rediscovered my own story while reconnecting with my older brother Peter, a former race car driver. He is now an inmate suffering from terminal cancer. I have also found order in chaos. I thank God for the people who hurt me and hate me, as well as those who love. This is my story from the recycle bin of my mind.

My Worry List

I adored my childlike qualities. Nobody else saw the world the way I did. As it grappled with a deadly virus, I worried about the rash in my shorts. I wondered existentially. Why do fleas turn back-flips when they jump? How did they communicate and what would they say to each other? These were nagging questions to which my mother always had the same answer: It’s God’s will.

My early days as a Silverbrand with mother, Elizabeth, father Edmund and brother Peter. My first words were, Isn’t that nice.

I had always seen the world through a toddler’s optimism. Isn’t that nice? were my first recorded words. And for the rest of my adult life, I would assume that everything was nice until it was proven otherwise.

Bambi, fit that narrative. It was the story of fluffy, cute animals gamboling in the forest spouting words to live by. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all, Thumper the rabbit advised his forest friends.

How cruelly Walt Disney had shattered my bliss. I remember watching the movie as a five-year-old, my mother holding my hand. Then, I heard the rifle shot, Bambi’s mother killed by a hunter. Man has come to the forest, said the animals, and I screamed in horror. For years to come, I would imagine my world as an idyllic place, impervious to evil. But if anything, Bambi should have prepared me for life’s reality - humans can be cold blooded.

As a 12-year-old with my own bedroom, I had decided to be a foster dad to two white mice. The boy who had them said they were the same gender. Therefore, there was no need to separate them, I thought.

Of course the boy was wrong: one was male and the other female. Quickly, my two mice became eight, the parents and six little tykes scampering under my bed and depositing droppings everywhere. What a harsh way to learn about unplanned pregnancy. My parents hadn’t prepared me for this - but then, they weren’t prepared for the Silverbrand boys either.

My older brother, Peter, was smart but calculating. He knew how to have fun with dangerous things - firearms and explosives. While I was celebrating life through my mice, he could put life in jeopardy. I believed in paying it forward. He preferred payback, resolving conflict by having the last word.

When his school principal decided to punish him for bad behavior, Peter had an ax to grind. The principal was our father, Edmund. Peter knew how the cookie crumbled - or, in this case, the whole cake.

Banished to the corner of the principal’s office, 11-year-old Peter asked if he could eat his lunch. Then, unwrapping his chocolate cake, he allowed its crumbs to fall to the floor. None of the cake made it to his mouth. So, at the end of his half-hour punishment, Peter had sifted a mountain of chocolate crumbs.

At the time, I was amused by his