8. DISORDER IN THE COURT

One day, decades from now, we will need someone’s words to remind us we survived a worldwide pandemic. In its eternal spin cycle, the earth will drain us off, one by one, and all that will remain will be stories people told, remembered “telephone game” fashion, or recorded somewhere in some digital newspaper or on an obsolete blog.

Here’s one:

In March 2020 the virus that had infested mankind, now given the name of Covid 19, had stormed the shores of the United States and shut down life as we knew it. Public facilities locked their doors. Only essential businesses were allowed to remain open; places like grocery stores, pharmacies and hospitals. There was a panicked rush on items like bottled water, sanitizer, bleach and toilet paper. If you could find any of these, there was a stern limit on how many one person could buy. People were asked to not purchase n95 masks so they would remain available for health care workers. We wore plastic gloves if we went out, and whatever kind of mask we could find. I pulled out my sewing machine and fashioned my own, but elastic was hard to find for the ear pieces, so I eventually resorted to using shoelaces. When we came home from the outside world, we removed our clothing, placed it in the washing machine, and showered with soap. There was so little we knew about how the virus spread, so we took every caution as we watched people dying alone, intubated and breathless in sterile hospital rooms. We had reason to fear.

When we did venture out to the grocery store we brought our items home and sterilized them with bleach or alcohol, or let them sit in the garage or on the porch for three days before using them. We were told that the virus would not survive after three days in the air.

Slight disorder in the court.

Government buildings, including courthouses, shut down in March. As my husband, Dave, was presiding judge in the Second District Court for the State of Utah, he spent quite frankly most of his waking hours that world. They closed the doors of the courtrooms, but the processes of the court needed to continue as much as possible. With a very steep learning curve, they figured out how to arrange arraignments, trials and hearings to be held virtually. We are fortunate to have a fairly quiet household, with our kids all grown and gone, so we set up our study with three computer monitors. Well, to be honest, we had to shuffle a few things to make it appear a little more orderly than it really is. We brought the old American flag I bought in Plymouth MA and set it against the bookcase for a backdrop. Dave removed his framed law school diploma and hung his black judicial robes on the hook instead. During each day, before I would run the blender or clang around in the kitchen, I would peek through the glass doors from the entry hall to see if he was in his robes. If he was, then it was quiet time out here.

Dave's robes hang on the wall in
our study, with his face mask.

On Wednesdays I held  Zoom (virtual) church Relief Society presidency meetings in the family room while Dave held court in the den. On Thursdays I taught guitar, trying to situate my instrument to show the sound hole and the neck in the same camera shot. I had to keep it to finger picking so it didn’t sound like Musak was playing in the courthouse. Such strange choreography was going on in our house! We had to fight disorder in the court.

One night, as I sat at the desk in our study, addressing labels for CD orders, I glanced up and noticed that Dave’s laptop was situated on top of a book, probably to set the camera at the proper level. Peeking under it, I noticed it was a large book from the bookshelf.

Dave's court computer sits on a
large copy of the New Testament.

And there you have it. The New Testament. A true and firm foundation, underlying all the craziness that became our lives in the springtime of the year 2020. So much was shifted, and frankly pretty unsteady. But the simple, solid truths, upon which all change rests, remained, thankfully, unchanged.