I only have to walk 20 or 30 feet in every direction from my home to find people who are fighting coronavirus on the front lines while I do my part staying indoors, heeding recommendations aimed at halting the deadly disease.
Across the street and up a couple of houses, my neighbor transitioned a week ago from working as a corporate cook to driving into Boston and going to work at one of the big hospitals where he helps feed the medical professionals working to save lives.
He sounded like a grizzled combat veteran when he explained without batting an eye, “I go where they tell me to go.” The job shift essentially means living at home in a semi-quarantined state, even though he said his new workplace has rigorous coronavirus screening procedures in place.
He doesn’t consider himself a hero and he is happy to be useful. “Hey,” he said, “I’d just as soon go to work than sit at home.”
Just feet away from where he lives is another neighbor enjoying retirement after a long nursing career. She’s a low-key, family-oriented woman. But I would bet a week’s paycheck that she would answer the call to don scrubs again and get to work if she got the call. She knows fellow nurses still on the job who spent decades caring for newborns and are now treating adults with coronavirus.
That reality hints at the constant innovation and imagination medical professionals are applying to their jobs even as they work around the clock treating people. Doctors, nurses and all the people who help them do their jobs, are finding ways to get personal protective equipment and learning what works and doesn’t work in the war against coronavirus.
Another neighbor who became an operating nurse in her 50s is on the coronavirus front line. She’s one of those rare people with a tough-as-nails personality and a heart as big as Montana — a combination making her perfect to help people get well and saving lives.
Her sons are providing service directly and indirectly in the coronavirus fight. One is a local police officer committed to keeping people safe, even as he risks his own life coming in proximity with people who may have coronavirus. Another works with troubled kids under circumstances similar to his older brother, the cop, and a third is aboard a Navy ship making sure our country is safe, even though he faces the dual threat of disease and American enemies.
The fourth brother is making sure a building in Lynn vital to keeping information flowing to the city’s residents is kept clean and coronavirus-free.
Like the guy up the street, another neighbor has seen his job responsibilities shift into a coronavirus role. He is getting the training necessary to help ensure medical professionals have the gear they need to do their jobs.
My other neighbors have done things during the last week that, at first glance, may not seem to be related to battling the pandemic. One tossed a ball around with her son on a sunny day. The other affixed sculpted metal palms to his front-porch railing. In their own ways they remind me to hold onto what is important in life, including family and faith, in the face of a deadly threat.
All these people rate as heroes in my book. How about me? What have I been doing to battle the scourge? I hauled my old Yamaha guitar over to my godson’s house a couple of times and banged away at “Dead Flowers” and “Lawyers, Guns and Money” on the porch for a half hour. The kid’s well-defined humor prompted him to drop four quarters into my guitar case and I almost lied when he asked me, “Did you write those songs?”
The good news about doing our part during times like these, even if that part seems somewhat insignificant, is that every act done on someone else’s behalf constitutes a major effort to make things better.
When you are a father’s son, you find yourself occasionally defining courage the way it was laid out for you by your father. For years I thought my daredevil dad considered rock climbing, rapid running and fast driving acts of courage. When I got older and started really listening to the stories he didn’t tell as often as the funnier ones, I realized his true acts of courage were solitary ones, like when he refused to let his business go down the drain, or ones undertaken in solidarity, like the protests he participated in with my mother in the 1960s.
If we are helping others in this trying time, then we are all displaying courage and, although we might not feel like it, we are heroes.
