Stuff That Really Matters — or maybe not

Early on, I worried about my fingernails. My fingernails, you see, tend to split perpendicularly, making the simplest tasks like folding socks or making beds a nightmare that leaves me with sometimes bloody fingertips. This affliction struck when I was in my 40s – which was a very long time ago. About 20 years ago (I’m in my 60s by then) my physician gave me her blessing to go get the fancy silk wrap manicure. I think she mainly wanted to get me off her back, having patients with somewhat more severe issues than splitting fingernails. Anyway, you can dig in the dirt with these fingernails. For the past 10+ years they have been gracefully administered by the lovely Little Yen at California Nails. Little Yen is so designated because there’s an older Yen at California Nails. Little Yen is a beautiful young woman whose eyes, when she smiles, which is frequently, crinkle into merry little upside down crescents with accent lines springing outward like fireworks. She has two beautiful children, Rachel and Randy, who are U.S, citizens as I hope Little Yen may soon be. And as a manicurist she is without peer. One springtime she painted little flowers on my nails, just for fun. There is not a day that I don’t worry about how Little Yen is surviving; I can’t find her to ask, or to help. A silk wrap manicure by Little Yen will last for three weeks, maybe longer – at some point the dig-in-the-dirt layer will grow itself out and my ridggedy, problem nails will be on their own. I am somewhere past that point just now.

But we are indeed at an interesting, maybe a tiny bit hopeful, point. Early on in the U.S. chapter of the Covid19 saga I heard a pundit optimistically punditize, “American innovation is going to be the thing that saves us.” Yeah, sure, I muttered. But it’s beginning to look like a wise observation, and perhaps a truth. People are whipping out masks & PPEs on their sewing machines, or making shields and who knows what else with 3-D printers, and creating ventilators from CPAP machines – while every lab in the country is racing to come up with therapies or, some day, a vaccine. One guy in San Francisco’s North Beach district even devised a way to hand out free coffee to his neighbors via a Halloween mechanical gorilla arm; his five-year-old son came up with the idea. Despite being essentially without a left brain, I study every new report of a new lab report like a maniac.

Most of us are a little jagged, because life everywhere was interrupted by the coronavirus. And who likes to be interrupted? My own life was interrupted midway through cataract surgery. I have one new, cataract-free left eye; the right eye was scheduled for Monday, March 16 – well, so much for that eye. Since March 16 I have been sheltering in place with one good eye, one foggy eye and a pair of glasses that have no idea what they’re supposed to be correcting for.

Something else has been more universally interrupted. When my late husband Bud turned 75 I threw him an OGTAB party, to which invitees were to bring a statement of One Good Thing About Bud written on a business card or similar note. Virtually nobody paid any attention to that size suggestion. I wound up with 8 by 10 framed declarations, posters, canvas paintings and one wind-up music box playing an original message. A lot of the OGTABs referred to martinis, but even more of them said Hugs. Bud was a 6’4” bear of a guy who never met anyone – especially a female anyone – whom he didn’t want to hug. Sometimes perfect strangers only newly introduced. Bud would make Joe Biden look like a cold fish. I don’t know about Biden-hug recipients (who are likely to be few and far between from here on out), but Bud-hug recipients simply knew they were huggable. Who doesn’t want to be huggable? This nation was built on hugs, for heaven’s sakes. Handshakes, at a minimum. When this is over may we please touch one another again?

Which brings this essay back to where it started. Some things matter, and others not so much. We can figure out ways to deal with home manicures – even home haircuts although I think I’m going with pigtails. We can pick up lives where they were interrupted, and most of those interruptions will be found to matter very little.

What matters are the people who are suffering. Very few manicurists have savings accounts. I have been down every possible road, without success, trying to find Little Yen just so I could send her a few dollars. Multiply her by a few million and that’s how many people we somehow need to reach, and help. What matters are the innovators and the front-line people they are trying to help.

And eventually, the hugs.

This essay appeared first on Medium.com, an excellent site for the exchange of ideas and information, on which I’ve begun posting. You might enjoy visiting it too.