by Philip Caputo | Aug 31, 2020 | News
The family vacation and the road trip — two American institutions — are attended by a certain tension during this year of pandemic. Will the people at the next gas station or convenience store, in the next town or state, be wearing masks and practicing...
by Philip Caputo | Jul 16, 2020 | Journal of a Plague Year, News
A post office delivery driver rang the doorbell at a little past nine this morning. In her hands was a cardboard box with the return address for the Edwin Bennett Funeral Home in Scarsdale, N.Y. and a sticker that read, in small type, United States Postal Service, and...
by Philip Caputo | Jul 4, 2020 | Journal of a Plague Year
Mourn on the Fourth of July. Watching President Trump’s Yankee Doodle extravaganza at Mount Rushmore, he and his unmasked audience under the stony gazes of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, I was taken back to two points in the past. The first...
by Philip Caputo | Jun 28, 2020 | Journal of a Plague Year
Today is Sunday, June 28, and we have been back In Connecticut a little over a week. Three days ago, we learned that the state has ordered everyone coming in from states experiencing significant increases in the Covid19 virus to self-quarantine for 14 days....
by Philip Caputo | Jun 23, 2020 | Journal of a Plague Year
The headline in a June 22 Politico dispatch read as follows: ‘THE U.S. HAS HAMSTRUNG ITSELF’: HOW AMERICA BECAME THE NEW ITALY ON CORONA VIRUS. And the subhead: “While Trump touted America’s reopening and watched infections climb, European...
by Philip Caputo | Jun 20, 2020 | Journal of a Plague Year, News
We arrived in Connecticut yesterday evening at six, after driving 10 hours a day for four days. We covered 2,459 miles through 12 states and over nine major rivers: the Rio Grande, Pecos, Canadian, Cimarron, Mississippi, Ohio, Susquehanna, Delaware, and Hudson. I...
by Philip Caputo | Jun 17, 2020 | Journal of a Plague Year
We left Patagonia at 8:30 a.m.yesterday, on a four-to-five day drive back to Connecticut. By the time we arrived at our first night’s destination, Tucumcari, New Mexico, we learned that Arizona had set a record for new cases of the Covid19 virus. Texas and Florida...
by Philip Caputo | Jun 12, 2020 | Essays, Journal of a Plague Year
I ran into a friend, Robin Baxter, yesterday morning as he was walking his dog and I was getting set to walk mine. He asked when Leslie and I were leaving Arizona for Connecticut, and I told him Tuesday, adding that it looked like we were getting out just in time. The...
by Philip Caputo | Jun 9, 2020 | Journal of a Plague Year, News
You can feel removed from the tumult convulsing the country in this small Arizona town, nestled in a valley between the Santa Rita and Patagonia mountains, about 60 miles southeast of Tucson and 18 miles north of the Mexican border. No hordes of protestors surging...
by Philip Caputo | Jun 4, 2020 | Essays, Journal of a Plague Year
Today, June 4, 2020, is my and Leslie’s 32d anniversary, and we spent part of it, unromantically, at a demonstration protesting the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis. Considering that Patagonia, Arizona, has 913 residents and that...
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