As I type this, I, like many of you, am at home. My infant son is thankfully sleeping in his crib. A wall and about 12 feet separates me from the quiet little angel who’ll wake up, coo for five minutes and then morph into an eight ball of energy that’ll cry relentlessly until I unload a quarter-pound of alkaline-smelling formula poop, then set him up with both a clean diaper and full 4 p.m. bottle feed.
My wife gave birth to him four months ago at Tampa General Hospital. It was December, so TGH’s roof was illuminated by a gigantic light display. I like to think that Patrick—named after my father-in-law who passed away from brain cancer two years ago—is our baby boy born under the Christmas tree. Patrick will be the only child my wife and I have. As sweet as he is, the world doesn’t want another one of our spawn—trust me.
If I’m lucky, and stay healthy, I’ll be able to tell Patrick about how the world almost fell apart when he was a baby. I’ll be able to tell him how mommy went back to the place where he was born—three times a week, 13 hours a day—to take care of people. People who were all scared of getting a disease that was so contagious that it could force them to die alone on a hospital bed.
I’d heard that caring for an infant was not easy. I now know that caring for one—all alone, while your wife risks her life at work, and while you and your small, recently-furloughed team of alt-weekly junkies puts out a paper and maintains a website—feels indescribably impossible.
But I’m not alone in that. Every night, my wife hits the pillow, and worries about whether or not she might be bringing the contagion into our home. Across Tampa Bay, and across the world, people are scared, and they’re tired. I read somewhere that we’re supposed to treat our new lives as shut-ins like a marathon, not a sprint. But I, like so many of you, feel beat the fuck up every night when I go to bed. It’s crazy to think that there are others who go to sleep feeling even more run down.
The following pages aren’t meant to make it feel worse, but they are meant to show you that there are folks who feel scared, and tired, just like you. Some of them, like Lynn Hurtak and Tim Burke, want to try and help. Others, like Joel Davis, are asking you to help them feed their employees. And more, like so many of the do-gooders on Food 1, are turning their anxiety into actions that are feeding their communities. Our cover guy, Tampa rapper Big Baby Scumbag, also has something positive to add to the conversation.
The following pages feature stories from the past week, which will go down as one of the hardest weeks of all of our lives… until next week gets here. One day, if we’re lucky, and we stay healthy, we’ll all be able to sit across from each other at the table and talk about all the things we’ve learned. We’ll talk about how this community—our collective home—came together to lift each other up in the face of it all. I hope that someday, you’ll get to read that story in this paper. But in the meantime, I, like you, will be at home waiting it out. And one day, I, like you, if we’re lucky, will walk back into the door of my house, and remember what the word “home” really means after all.
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This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2020.