Category: Warren Zevon


Don’t Let Us Get Sick
(Coversongs for a growing pandemic)

March 8th, 2020 — 2:05pm




There’s so much to share: a new favorite YouTube sibling duo; still-unfeatured covers albums and singles from Karine Powalt and Ruston Kelly, Rachel Kilgour and Tracy Grammer; our afternoon at the Joe Val Bluegrass Festival, where The Lonesome Ace Stringband rekindled our appreciation for the clawhammer and fiddle trio and young bluegrass quintet The Tinder Sweethearts wowed the crowd with a Billy Joel cover and a Billie Eilish mash-up; the way fat, lazy snowflakes tease us outside our March windows before the temperature soars once again past 40, triggering the nagging climate brainbuzz.

But there’s something urgent on the radar, crowding out the rest of the world. It’s everywhere, and everpresent, and we have skin in the game aplenty. Misinformation on social media is painful; misunderstandings hit hard.

And so, in the interests of contagion, we’re going in.

Read on for a short personal prayer, followed by a small half-set of songs of hope and longing in the darkness, that we may remember our most compassionate selves as sickness and fear wash over the world once again.



Saturdays at the assisted living facility have never been so deserted. My father blames the news – people are scared of the Coronavirus, he thinks, and staying in their small apartments, avoiding social contact. It’s hard to argue otherwise. The parking lot is much emptier than usual, as is the dining room at lunch. The halls are somber and quiet, the few residents we pass on our way to my father’s floor and back again wary and alone, unaccompanied by the families and children whose voices usually fill these spaces on weekends.

Life goes on, of course. I’m writing lesson plans today for a week in the classroom; the girls are at church today, singing in the choir. The social need is too great, too much a part of who we are, and what we have to do; so far, at least, we have not changed our trajectories, even as we study which songs to sing while we wash our hands.

But even here, the anxiety cannot fully fade. My social media feed buzzes as the politicized gives way to something more urgent and global. Artists and collaborative spirits saddened by the cancellation of their favorite music festivals and congregations chat on Facebook, debating their losses, trying to come to terms with the trade-offs of community, economic necessity, and civic commitment. Friends whose children were sent home from viral hotspots send warning emails, their terms abroad interrupted into home quarantine. Coworkers offer elbows instead of fist-bumps in greeting. Friday, two kids in my last period class came in wearing masks. Midway through the block, a custodian I’d never seen before slipped in, wiped the door handles down with something pink and caustic-looking, and then slipped out, leaving my students and I silent and thoughtful in the midst of learning.

At night my immunocompromised daughters sleep as restfully as they can in their lifetime of pain, not yet caught in the additional web of worry as a pandemic slowly spreads around us. I think of how fragile we are, and how much of our best it takes to manage the pressure of undefined crisis before us as the world keeps turning. I think about how hard it is to teach my students to care – to think critically, analytically, rationally, and empathetically – in a way that our civic body desperately needs, both in times like these and always. I think of how pain makes us stronger, and how desperately I want to believe that this is true of society as much as it is true of the individual spirit. I wonder if it’s time to stop visiting my father for a while, and try not to cry.

May we be kind, and spread ideas carefully after considering them carefully. May we not ply our fears, or our biases, but our understanding and wisdom, and act accordingly. And may we practice grace, and humility, and mindfulness – those most elusive things – in helping hold our society, and hold it together, as the world ever continues its encroachment into our communities and our lives.


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