By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

COVID 19 is an epidemic tailor made for my husband, a man who has at least one pharmaceutical product for every year he has been alive. Calamine. Bendaryl. Lomitrin. Neosporin. Tums. The catalog of ailments we can treat from our master bathroom is astounding. Dry skin. Oily skin. No skin. Name a malady; we have a salve. Warning: we’re really good at buying stuff, less good at knowing what we have.

Not surprisingly, with the threat of impending quarantine, my husband decides we have to stock up on food. Stuck in, we can’t live on the food channel or Netflix alone. Making room in our freezer requires a reckoning that yields some unwelcome news. In various wedged-in spots, we have six boxes of frozen cauliflower pizza crusts, one of them expired.

I go along with my husband. But for me, getting ready for a quarantine feels like a stretch. You make fun of all the people who have four-wheel-drive because you insist it never snows, I remind Hal. Why is this any different? Apparently, it is — and that’s how I find myself with $800 worth of groceries one oddly balmy late February morning. I tell him the sodium in all the cans of Campbell’s Soup he insists on buying will kill us way before coronavirus ever does.

It doesn’t really matter that we aren’t quarantined by this stupid thing. Our conversations have been completely hijacked by it. In our umpteenth discussion about how to protect ourselves, my sister tells me the answer is elderberry. She bought it in gummy form, she says.

According to the Internet, elderberry enhances the immune system and suppresses the appetite — great to have medical sanction for a supplement that allows you to be both skinny and well. The contraindications are fairly minimal, my sister tells me. Just make sure, Medline warns, it doesn’t interfere with anything else you’re taking. Apparently the anything else is mostly birth control. Well, I wouldn’t be in the close-to-high-risk group if birth control were still an issue. Maybe elderberry is a better coping mechanism than denial.

Last night, I had my first coronavirus dream, not surprising because other than the Democratic primary and the dog, it seems it’s all we talk about over breakfast. In my dream, I’m invited to a high school party at a house that appears to be in Jersey City, which is incidentally not where I grew up. I end up spending the entirety of the party sitting with a young woman who has a fever and a cough.

This weekend, my dream comes true. Sort of. We find ourselves at a French movie festival across from Lincoln Center. And that’s when I hear it. I nudge my husband. “That woman behind us? She’s coughing nonstop,” I whisper. “Do you think she has Corona?” I’m half kidding, or at least I think I am. Hal whispers back. “That’s just a nervous cough.” And given what’s going on, is it any wonder that people are nervous?

A nervous cough…hmm. It’s an odd moment of equanimity for the doomsday tsar. But I snuggle into him as I take it.

By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I’m the least likely person to explain sewer caps to a four-year-old. Who even thinks about sewer caps? For the uninitiated, they are the metal bumps that protrude from the ground on the patches of lawn in front of many suburban houses.

The truth is when you’re as close to the ground as my granddaughter is, every prone object — from acorn to cinderblock to sewer cap — feels fascinating, worthy of discussion. What are the caps for, my granddaughter wants to know.

I realize this is one of those defining moments of our relationship: when I’m about to respond to a question, and I don’t have the vaguest idea of what I’m talking about. Do I punt? Does she have to be six before she realizes that sometimes I make stuff up? I was an English major in college, and while I can talk about Blake and Spencer, my sewer knowledge is — yes, I admit it — sparse.

Before I was a grandma, I wasn’t afraid to be imperfect. I was the parent who dreaded being Shabbat Mom in preschool because I was deathly afraid to light a match. My boys used to laugh at me because when I made them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I couldn’t get the two halves of the bread to line up. They probably felt they had a mom who often wore her metaphorical clothes inside out. On the first family vacation after my husband died, I asked my 11-year-old son to go get an emergency tampon for me from the mom in the family we were traveling with. He had no idea what he was delivering or why I needed it so fast. But he appreciated that sometimes I was forgetful, overwhelmed and disorganized.

So, is it any wonder that I want my granddaughter to think I’m all-knowing? That I no longer want to be the person who missed out on all the things adults should know because she was under a tree reading a Nancy Drew mystery? Maybe maturity is realizing that being willing to answer is more important than what is actually said.

Every house has its own sewer cap, I start to explain, which should be painfully obvious since we’ve passed about 20 sewer caps of various stripes on our walk. And then I offer a meager and uninformative nugget — that people need sewer pipes if they want to go to the bathroom in their houses. I just hope my granddaughter overlooks that I haven’t actually said anything substantive about sewer caps. I’m lucky she’s four.

I’ve rarely been with a child who’s as attuned to her surroundings as my granddaughter is. When we pass the man whose drill makes sparks on the sidewalk, she stays still so she can fully process his answer to her question about what he’s doing. And thus unfolds the story of how he’s cutting a baseboard.

My granddaughter speaks (and listens) in exclamation points. Everything is just so damned interesting to her. I love my granddaughter’s questions. My own answers may sometimes be sketchy, but that doesn’t diminish my joy whenever I see the light in her eyes as I start talking.