A few weeks ago, we moved to Madison, Wisconsin as COVID-19 refugees of the fortunate variety. We’ve been locked out of China since January 28th and have lived in approximately seven different locations in Thailand and the US before finally settling here in Madison where we have bought a small “covid condo” that we can live in until the pandemic subsides and we can get a flight and visas back to Beijing where we live and are employed as international school teachers (with two international school teenagers trailing along).
Here’s the view from the balcony of our covid condo
*If you’d like to read more about our adventures, please go back in this blog to revisit our diaspora.
Meantime, imagine starting from scratch in a new house, and I mean from scratch. What we brought with us on our cross-country sojourn from California to Wisconsin were a few suitcases of clothes and some bits and bobs we had acquired along the way. When we left Beijing in January, we assumed we would be returning in two weeks. All we had when we arrived in California to stay at our good friend Laurie’s vacant house, after two and a half months in Thailand, was what we packed for our trip there: tee shirts, shorts, sundresses, flip flops and swim suits. Now, the trunk of the 2003 Toyota Avalon we had purchased while living in the Sierra Nevada Mountains (Sounds a little bit like The Shining, doesn’t it?) had those few items along with a jumble of new and warmer clothes we had bought when the thrift stores finally opened in California.
Arriving in Madison with a trunk full of so-much-nothing, we needed to get our 850 square foot apartment fitted out with furniture and the basic necessities of living. My lovely sister-in-law, Ellen, lent us blow-up beds, some pots and pans, towels, sheets, a rocking chair, a coffee table and four fold up chairs with an accompanying card table. Our dear friend Eydie added to the bounty by supplying us with lamps, dishes, mugs and other sundries. We could manage by each day procuring a few more needed items. Utensils, anyone? How about a frying pan? We were camping! (About a month later, it feels a little less like camping, and more like college-living, only with two teenagers thrown in the mix!) We’ve gradually managed to collect pieces of furniture from thrift stores and curbsides and a few new pieces, but our house definitely has a 20-something, bohemian vibe that our half-a-century-plus personas might not have chosen, but we are nonetheless surprisingly delighted by the simplicity and mishmash of it all.
On that first day in our new condo, what we did not have and could not gradually collect were groceries: we needed them and we needed them now. After our inaugural meal of Chinese food delivery (Thank goodness for the plastic forks they provided, though we wondered why there were no chopsticks.), I ventured out to Woodman’s, a Madison institution of a grocery store that is famous for both its abundance and cheap prices. Many moons ago, I had lived in Madison and loved going up and down the aisles, gazing at the multitudes of merchandise: a veritable museum of food. Being a Canadian who lives in Asia, the sheer quantity and choice of foods in America never ceases to amaze and entice.
Prior to my evening departure, I made an extensive list: salt, pepper, oil, spices, bread, butter, yogurt, fruit, dishrack, peanut butter, cereal, milk ad infinitum, finding it truly mind-boggling how much one needs just to get the larder stocked when you start with nothing. I set my phone GPS for the store, bid my family adieu, and told them to meet me in the parking lot in a few hours to help me unload the groceries that were sure to fill the trunk to capacity.
Mask strapped on, list in hand, I jauntily entered the grocery store at approximately 7 PM, ready to take on the world of shopping like a veritable Mary Tyler Moore ready to dive bomb the TV news industry. I was good at this. I loved it. And so much to see! The cart was soon exploding with merchandise – things I hadn’t imagined I’d need, but truly did.
A few minutes into the shop, I got a frantic text saying “Dad says to buy a plunger – the toilet is plugged.” Already? Well, of course, we needed a toilet brush as well. Oh, and toilet paper. And cleanser. The apartment needed some serious elbow grease. I circumnavigated the aisles like a world traveler exploring back alleys. The aisles were a dizzying array of selection. What fun! At first. Maybe for an hour or so…
I didn’t know where everything was so I had to keep circling back to get things from my list that I had apparently missed in aisles that were clear across the store – football fields away. My feet started aching in my overused flip flops and I was parched from wearing my mask. When I finally made it to the checkout, it was 10:15 PM and my cart full in the how-many-kids-can-you-fit-in-a-Volkswagen kind of way. I could barely heave it forward.
With the exception of one checkout counter with a cashier, all the rest, at that time of night, were self-checkout. At the best of times and with the fewest of items, I have never had success with self-checking and I knew the Herculean task of unilaterally checking out more than 500 items in my cart, would be tantamount to reaching Everest Base Camp. In short, impossible.
I lined up behind three other folks, whose carts had reasonable amounts in them, at least for America. In China, a daily shop is de rigueur so a small basket usually suffice. As I waited, I noticed a sign that read: “Woodman’s Card of Choice is Discovery.” I had a brief frisson of panic. Surely they took Visa cards. Who doesn’t? I had no checks on me. Did everybody who shopped here deal in cash? Not likely. I was confused. In China, there are rarely cash transactions anymore –from buying a car to a stalk of celery, it is all done by scanning a bar code with your phone. In fact, there is a beggar who inhabits the steps of our local western grocery store in Beijing, and I always make a point of giving him some money. When he sees me coming, he calls out, “Pengyou,” (friend) and pulls a laminated QR code out of his pocket so I can scan it with my phone and give him 20 kwai. The idea of paying cash or writing a check is completely foreign to me these days. My fears were allayed when I got to the checkout and asked if Visa was accepted. The cashier confirmed Visa would be fine, and we started to disassemble the deluge of groceries from my cart, reassembling it into bags on the other side.
My cashier appeared to be fairly new at her job, and it was taking her a long time to check out my items. The fresh produce, in particular, presented her with a challenge: she flipped through pages of codes each time, and when I told her, “Never mind, I don’t need those bananas,” or “Forget about the tomatoes. Who needs lyceum anyway?” she let me know she could not escape the apparently-complicated cash register system she was logged into in order to nix the articles. Time crept on. I took a Dr. Pepper out of the convenience fridge across from the till and had her scan it before taking furtive swigs, pulling aside my mask for just seconds at a time, feeling guilty for doing so.
About half an hour into this arduous process, I noticed the man behind me had no cart. I asked him why he was even there. “I just want a pack of cigarettes,” he said. I was mortified. I was making this man wait the better part of an hour for one item – even if it was a cancer-causing one?
“Just let me buy your cigarettes for you,” I said, marking the first time this naïve girl has ever bought a pack of smokes. He gratefully accepted, the cashier stopped to grab his Marlboro Lights from the back, and she scanned them onto my bill. He left happily. I still don’t know how much I paid for those cancer sticks.
Slowly, surely, my cart began to empty and the cart that the bagger was filling on the other side began to bulge. Midway through, I remembered we needed ice so I went running around the store, following the directions of the cashier, but to no avail. The packer finally went and got the ice for me while I continued his unenviable job of bagging my groceries. He was already onto the second cart, and my family necessities were embarrassingly beginning to look like a garbage dump of plastic.
Finally, it came time to pay. I pulled out my Visa card and confidently inserted it into the chip reader slot. NOT VALID. I tried again. Same response. People behind me shifted, uncomfortable for me and already annoyed by the inordinate amount of time it had taken to check me out.
“Why isn’t my Visa working? You told me you took Visa!”
“Is it a debit card?” she asked.
“No, it’s not a BLANKING debit card,” I wanted to reply, but did not. The night manager came over when I started to cry and stutter, “I’ve been shopping here for three hours. I just stood in this line for an hour and the cashier assured me that you took Visa. What am I supposed to do?”
In that moment, it seriously felt like my world was going to end. In the back of my mind, I knew I’d be able to laugh about this someday, maybe even next week, but in that moment, I felt like I was on a battlefield and my life depended on getting those damn groceries. Visions of coming back tomorrow and slogging through this whole process again made my eyes well up with tears behind my smudged and fogged-up glasses. Tears were now streaming down onto my masked face and I wanted to pull the damn mask off and blow my nose with it.
“Do you have any other means of paying?” the boss lady asked. “A check? An ATM card?”
“No! I don’t have anything here. Everyone takes Visa in America!”
“Well, we don’t,” she stated matter-of-factly. Then she brightened. “How about you go home, see what you can do, and we will put this all in the cooler for you? Come back tonight when you figure out what to do.”
Come back TONIGHT? It was barely tonight anymore – it was almost midnight! I couldn’t imagine coming back in a week, never mind tonight!
I nodded blearily and conceded that there was nothing more to be done. I gave her my name and she wrote it on a post-it and taped it on the cart, letting me know she would hold my merchandise for the remainder of the night.
I walked to the car in defeat, slathered myself in hand sanitizer, removed the mask, and took a giant slug of the diet Dr. Pepper I had bought. Oops. I had not bought it! I was officially a thief now – a soda and a pack of cigarettes had exited the store without being paid for.
While on my way to Woodman’s many hours ago, my phone had refused to talk to me. I had plugged the address into the phone’s GPS and it worked fine, only I couldn’t get the oral component to work. I wear progressive lenses and have a hard time driving with them, but I can’t see my phone without them. I had come through a tangle of highways to get here and found it mightily confusing in daylight hours so I wasn’t sure how I was going to manage getting home, especially since I was blurred up from crying and my amygdala was working overtime.
I plugged in our home address and began the journey, hoping I’d be able to glance down and see the directions as I proceeded. As I merged onto the first highway my palms were sweaty. Where was my exit? Soon. Had I just missed it? I got off the highway as soon as possible, finding a Walmart to my left and fields to my right. Surely this wasn’t right. I kept driving, and as I crossed over some railway tracks, I saw train lights glaring at me – the train couldn’t have been more than 50 feet away! What-the-what? I gunned my engine, sped over the tracks where the barrier had NOT gone down to warn of oncoming trains, and pulled over to the side of the road, absolutely overcome with panic and fear. I was on the verge of a major breakdown.
Dear reader, I know this is a long read and I thank you for your patience and persistence thus far. I have forgotten to mention one other salient item: I thought I had packed a charger for my phone when I left the house hours ago, but had not. My phone was now at less than five percent battery and I knew the GPS ate charge like a bear devours salmon. I was soon to be lost with no idea how to get to our new home somewhere on the East Side of Madison. Also, my phone has a Chinese SIM card so I couldn’t make calls or text with anyone other than my family who also have phones bought in and for China.
I gave myself about 10 minutes to sob it out on the side of the road, and then I got to thinking through my options. There was only one left that my limited brain power could muster: go to my sister and brother in law’s house – they lived just a few minutes from Woodman’s. If I could retrace my route to the grocery store, I could navigate my way to their house. By this time, it was nearly one am, and they usually go to bed early. I knew Kal was a deep sleeper, but I hoped I’d catch Ellen up, or at least be able to rouse her from her sleep. I didn’t even know what I’d ask: maybe for written directions? A lift home? All I knew was that they were my only option.
I reversed my car, and went back over the train tracks, noticing that the train was actually idling, lights a-blazing, on the tracks. It hadn’t been speeding toward me after all. I felt a sting of embarrassment, relief, and incredulity. Driving slowly and deliberately, I crawled my way back to Woodman’s and then on to Ellen and Kal’s house, pulling up in their driveway next to a completely darkened house. As I approached the front door, I had an impulse to run, as though I were a thief, but I had nowhere to run to. I stood my ground, rang the doorbell and waited. It was loud. If either of them was not deeply asleep, it would be easy to hear. Nothing. I rang again, tentatively. Still nothing. At this point, I had nothing to lose, other than the love and respect of my beloved relatives. I held down the buzzer in the same fashion an irate driver might sit on the horn and honk continuously when the person in front of them at the intersection doesn’t know the light is green.
Still nothing. I was at a loss. I went and sat on the trunk of my car. My head in my hands, I wept. I felt about as hopeless as I had ever felt, which was interesting because I was a covid refugee of more than six months, who had been locked out of her host country of China, had lived in six different accommodations on two continents, had taught full time online, and had navigated countless challenges, but, in that moment, this felt like something much worse. The powerlessness that I felt: that I couldn’t get my BLANKING groceries, that I couldn’t get home, that I couldn’t’ even take refuge in the one place I knew how to get to: these things were the straws that finally broke this camel’s back.
It must have been moments later that Ellen appeared in the doorway. “Hello? Who’s there?” she asked tentatively. “What are you doing in my driveway?” One couldn’t have expected Ellen to recognize our car OR expect it to be in her driveway at well past midnight. We had just arrived in Madison the day before and she wasn’t yet used to having us around.
I jumped up and she startled with surprise upon seeing me.
“Leah! What’s wrong? Are you alright? Come in!” A pajama-clad, bleary-eyed Ellen led me into the house and a fresh and very boisterous bout of uncontrollable sobbing burst forth for probably another five minutes.
Ellen later recounted all the horrors that floated through her mind while waiting for me to gain my composure: had Don and I had an enormous blow up and were on our way to a nasty divorce, was one of the kids dead, had I burned down our new house? Many scenarios anxiously blew up in her brain, so when I finally managed to tell my story in heaving gasps, it was all she could do not to laugh. In fact, when I had finished this ridiculous tale, we spent another five minutes or so nearly rolling on the floor with helpless laughter. Telling it aloud made it seem so trivial. She told me how terrified she had been when she heard the doorbell ring and saw a strange woman standing at her door. She had wondered if I was an environmental canvasser (at midnight?) or a drug-befuddled woman trying to find her way home. She had peered out of the window for a long while, trying to figure out what to do. Call the police? Wake up Kal? She had then watched me go sit on the trunk of my car and wondered if this oddly-familiar-looking woman had actually smashed it into the side of her house.
After uproarious laughter, we brainstormed together about my next steps. Sleeping pill-befogged Ellen and just-beyond-hysteria Leah decided that she would give me her debit card to go back and pay for the 500-plus-dollars-worth of groceries sitting in the cooler. I would cut her a check the next day. Next step: how to get me home after I retrieved the groceries? Our initial thought was for her to give me her phone with our address plugged into the GPS. She had a repairman who was going to be calling her the next day, but she thought I could just call her with the information. But how would that work if I had her phone? Nonetheless, she got out a pad of paper and wrote her debit card code down for me along with her phone code, in case there was a problem. We fumbled clumsily through a variety of possibilities and in the middle of our brain-fogged brainstorm, Ellen realized she had an Apple charging cord so we got my now-nearly-dead phone up and running. We decided that even if my phone couldn’t talk to me, if she wrote the directions VERY LARGELY with a thick-tipped black Sharpie on a yellow pad of paper, I would be able to read them, even with my night-compromised sight.
As the phone came back to life, the texts from my family were coming in.
Don: I’m so tired. I have to sleep. What’s going on?
Charlotte: Where are you, Momma? Are you okay?
Emily: We’ll stay up and help you bring in the groceries. Are you coming soon?
Who knew if I was coming soon? First things first. I fired off a brief text explaining the situation: I couldn’t pay for the groceries so I left them there; I nearly got hit by a train; I got lost and can’t get home; Ellen is helping me now.
Eventually, after much comforting and coddling from Ellen, I got back in my car, backed out of the yard, half expecting to be hit by an oncoming vehicle because, after all, everything else had gone wrong, why not one more thing? But wait, where was the debit card? I stopped the car and decided to double check my wallet. I couldn’t afford one more faux pas. It wasn’t there. I parked and turned off the ignition. Fortunately, Ellen was still on the front steps, waving me off, like a woman waving her soldier husband off to war.
“What’s the matter?”
“I can’t find your debit card!”
We hastily looked around the living room, but it wasn’t to be found. I remembered how my Visa had slipped between the seat and the gear box a few months ago and I’d had to forfeit a shopping trip because I’d thought I’d lost my card. (Oh, I am a slow learner, aren’t I?) Sure enough, the card had slipped into the same place. Same as last time, my fat fingers couldn’t reach down to pull it out. I reversed the seat back, hoping to get easier access, but still no luck. Ellen went back to the house to get a variety of implements: tongs, chop sticks, a kebab skewer…the skewer proved to be the winning ticket: I managed to dislodge the card and tuck it safely into my wallet. As much as I adore her, I hoped I wouldn’t see Ellen again that night. I’m sure she hoped the same!
I easily drove myself back to Woodman’s, walking in sheepishly. I saw the boss lady right away. She seemed surprised to see me. She had obviously calculated that I wouldn’t dare show my face there again.
“I’ve come to get my groceries.”
“Do you have cash?” she asked suspiciously.
“No, I have a debit card,” I announced.
She took me to a station and had me punch in the number Ellen had fastidiously written on the yellow piece of paper.
“It’s not taking the number,” she announced. Déjà vu.
Was she serious? I was about to catapult out of my own skin. I tried again. It still didn’t work. It took me a moment, in my one-am stupor, to realize I was typing in Ellen’s phone code, not the debit card number. I typed in the five digits and voila – it worked! I half expected a chorus of angels to launch into the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah.
The cashier who had checked me out earlier came running over just as my two overflowing carts were being led to me.
“Thank God you are here! I was afraid I would have to pay for the cigarettes and your Dr. Pepper.”
“Oh, Honey,” was all I could say. My compassion switch flipped. To her, that could have been just as traumatic as me having to leave my groceries. During our checkout she had been telling me about her three children, her long, late-night hours, her worries about the pandemic, and the struggle her family was under. I know we shouldn’t have, but we hugged.
“Can you get those carts outside on your own? We’re kind of busy around here,” the manager said, motioning the cashier to get back to work. I saw about six other people in the store. Busy, my foot. I should have told her I needed help, but instead I cavalierly maneuvered two overflowing carts through the exit and to my car.
The 57 bags I had accumulated filled up the trunk and the backseat of my car. I stopped midway through loading to sanitize my hands and take off the mask I had forgotten I was wearing. I was sweating like a roofer on a hot day.
Final step: find my way home. I sat in the car a fairly long time before turning on the ignition, staring at Ellen’s directions. I plugged our address into my now-charging phone, willing the Australian-man-voice I had given Siri to talk to me. Why was I so stupid? How is it I had never learned how to turn on the volume for this app?
I eased out of the parking lot and back onto the highway, having memorized the exit I would need to get off of. Short minutes later I was off the highway and onto the correct road. I couldn’t see the next street I was meant to take so I put on my blinkers and pulled to the side of the road. Corporate Drive. Okay. I could find that. A few minutes later I was on the next street. Both the directions and the app concurred. The next street? I pulled over again. Starting and stopping. Backtracking and zigzagging, I made my way around the Isthmus of Madison, one of the most convoluted areas I have ever driven in. When I lived here years ago (pre GPS) I would just look to the State Capitol as my focal point and hope I was on the right side of it to get home to our Eastside residence. If I wasn’t, I would recalibrate and start again. I always got home somehow, but I don’t think it was ever easy.
What should have been a 12-minute journey home took me 45. Just short of 2 am, I pulled up at our condo, beads of perspiration dripping down my neck. I had turned the air conditioner off and the defroster on because the inside of the car kept fogging up. My windows were down. It was muggy in the middle of the night in Madison.
I pulled up to the back of the building where our balcony is located and honked the horn, neighbors be damned. The girls showed up immediately and I told them to meet me at the front parking lot. It’s about 300 feet and two sets of stairs just to get to our apartment building and then it’s another two flights to our second story nest. With the 57 bags and three exhausted females (Don was long asleep), you might imagine it took some time and energy to get the groceries into the house and unpacked. Given that our fridge is just a little bit bigger than one you’d find in a dormitory residence and the light bulb inside isn’t working, it was a feat to fit everything into its place.
After a few meager hours of fitful sleep, I was up early to take my sweetheart to urgent care. (Poor fellow, he had been silently going through his very own crisis while I was having mine.) When I turned on the ignition, I noticed the fuel light flashing and the dashboard display telling me I had four-miles worth of fuel. Not everything that could have gone wrong did, but nearly.
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Post Script: A month in, I have become a regular patron of Woodman’s and can easily navigate my way there and back again; my sweetheart’s health crisis has been averted; my sister-in-law and I meet up for regular walks and bike rides and dinners, and we laugh about this experience every single time.
This is Ellen and I running into each other at Woodman’s a few days later! Can you believe it?