Category: History Publisher: Indpendent
ISBN-10: B08D55N24Q
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 246
Copyright: July 18, 2020
ISBN-13: 9798655429147
A collection of the author’s daily postings on Facebook from March to June of 2020, the year of the Covid Pandemic. A testament to the stoic courage of the author’s friends & neighbors in their little piece of paradise on California’s Central Coast.
A collection of Facebook posts and comments from March through June of 2020, chronicling the events and effects of the Coronavirus lockdown of the seaside villages of Los Osos and Baywood Park and the environs of San Luis Obispo County, on California's Central Coast. Through a mixture of newsy reports and storytelling, the triumph of normal people overcoming shortages and restrictions, confusion, and consternation, emerge from the shadows. Humor brightens the way, social change is appraised, and applauded, and memories of past adventures add spice to days of isolation. Local heroes and sheroes risk health and welfare in providing essential services to friends and neighbors as together, this group of magnificent misfits through no desire of their own, write a living history.
Excerpt
Stephen King’s “Captain Trips” known presently as Coronavirus, or Covig-19, or, to those of a xenophobic bent, the “Chinese Virus,” circumnavigated the globe in late 2019 arriving on California’s Central Coast in the early months of 2020.
Just which month depends on an estimated report by the expert one distrusts the least.
In major cities, there were massive suffering and death. Panic buying found the weakest link in our chain of replenishment: toilet paper.
On California’s Central Coast there was mainly resignation, too much panic buying for a bit, political disagreement, the ebb and flow of fog and sunlight, and the howl of coyotes echoing off the Irish Hills. In other words, it was almost normal.
Almost.
Except for the fears. Of the unknown. Of the midnight question, “Will any of us get out of this alive?”
Guns and liquor were never in short supply.
Historians will chronicle events supported by addendum aplenty complete with charts and graphs showing a rising or flattening of two curves. One traces the growth of the pandemic. The other, the rise and fall of the Dow Jones Average.
Graduate students will analyze and publish sociological and psychological whimsey in doctorial theses adorned by the complexity of their titles. Folk singing scribes will capture a glimmer of hope shining through despair.
The pointed fingers of politicos will grow like Pinocchio's proboscis in search of any blame to obfuscate their own.
A president may fall of his own weight.
But rest assured, Dear Reader, that in these pages are only the meandering words of a participant, an observer, a fart in the winds of history, reaching out to share insight and mayhaps the light of humor to a group of friends and neighbors in Los Osos and Baywood, California and the extended environs of San Luis Obispo County and the world.
Social Media has become our communal campfire where stories are written as posts, lies compete, and we warm ourselves with the flame of human kinship.
To the world, the people in this story might serve as microcosm.
To me, this microcosm serves as my world.
Alan E. (Al) Strunk
Sea Oaks
Los Osos, CA
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Reviews for "Quarantine Quickies: Pandemic in Paradise"
I can see the humor in your opening excerpt. But I'm not sure if anyone would want to read your daily postings unless they were sure that what you wrote was worthy of a daily column for you little part of the world.
As for me, my daily routine changed little. I have been housebound since last October when I decided that autonomic dysreflexia causing unnatural sweating didn't mix with cold-weather. Incidentally, it doesn't mix with air conditioning either. I have been primarily online with people nearly forever, getting out very little since quitting driving three years ago. As a result of Coronavirus, my writer's group suddenly started using a meeting platform online that I've been digesting for many years.
325 letters my father wrote to my mother during his time in World War II.
Woven together in a timeline of events of three of his brothers, 5 brothers-in-law, and one cousin, all 10 of them were in WWII at the same time.
