We are socked in this morning. The fog has crept inland to where I can see no further than the Dashiell Hammett building a block away (Dashiell Hammett buildings are scattered all over the city. He moved around a lot, and almost every neighborhood has an apartment house pointed out by the locals as the very place where he wrote The Maltese Falcon.)

The rest is pale grayness and the distant, intermittent mooing of the fog horn. Quite a contrast to yesterday. which was bright and warm. This may burn off into a clear day by noon. It can take a lot of heat to kick up this much fog.

Our door buzzer rang yesterday, making us both jump. The cat growled and ran under the table. I started downstairs to see who it was and on the stairway I was overtaken by one of the bros coming out of their apartment. Handsome, bearded, slender and olive–skinned, like his two room-mates. “It’s all right,” he told me, smiling, “It’s just my dad. I think he locked himself out.”

Through the open door behind him I could see their empty place. “You guys moved already?” I asked.

“Yeah, Dad came by to help me get a few last things.”

“Well, so long and you stay healthy.”

“You too, Ma’am,” he said, as he hurried down. I’d glimpsed his family last summer when they were helping him to move in — a couple of curious younger siblings, Mom in a lavender sari, a large friendly family dog who’d come along for the visit and let me rub his cheeks in the lobby… The bros were considered too young and loud for the building, but I was still a little melancholy to see them go.

“Is this ever going to end?” I asked Michael last night. We were talking about the latest news. The first recorded death in the US from CV-19 was in early February here in the Bay Area, a fit, 57-year-old woman who thought she was recovering from the flu. Her daughter found her dead when she went by her apartment to check on her. An autopsy revealed she had CV-19, but had died from a heart attack, not respiratory distress. The poor woman’s heart had literally burst. Apparently blood clots and heart attacks can come with the sickness.

The World Health Organization has announced that there is no evidence that recovering from CV-19 makes you immune.

“It will end,” Michael said gently.

And it will. I have read enough about epidemics to know there have been many that were worse. AIDS, which in the ’80s was a long, agonizing death sentence. The Plague, of course, and the mysterious Sweat from the Tudor era, which made those who’d had it more vulnerable to reinfection, not less. Yellow Fever, like CV-19, would sometimes recede slightly, offering patients brief, mocking respites before moving in for the kill. Smallpox, Typhus, Cholera, all of those were deadlier. It’s just that this “now” sometimes seems like an eternity.

I find it helps to think about the bro I met on the stairway yesterday, and remind myself that for him, this place will likely just be nothing more than a slight tug on his memory. Decades from now, when he is my age, he may pass this building if it still stands and comment to someone “I think that’s the place I lived for a little while when I was young. Had to move out because of the epidemic in ’20. We threw some good parties up on the roof.”