Tucson COVID Tales No. 17: Of Cocktails and Frying Pans, by Hilary Stunda

Things were already a bit cozy well before Covid broke loose.

My husband, having occupied the kitchen table that served as my office for well over a year, was really starting to get on my nerves. During the first few weeks of isolation we were mild mannered, distanced, giving one another a lot of space. Then the kids came home from school—for good—and we felt like animals trapped in a cage.

Not that it was a bad cage. To console ourselves, we said, “This would be a million dollar apartment if it was in New York City!” But we were far from the hustle of Broadway and 104th Street, where I lived many moons ago. No, the vibrancy and texture of my old ’hood had been replaced by a middle-class suburban neighborhood with houses that all looked the same.

Weekend excitement meant bringing out the folding chairs to the end of the cul du sac with bottle in hand to share stories with the neighbors I seldom saw most of the year.

Thank God they’re Democrats.

My husband and I swore we wouldn’t get on each other’s nerves. Simple, really: just stay away from the urge to question, opine, suggest an air-conditioned road trip to Patagonia, repress the urge to hit him over the head with a frying pan, which looked funny on I Love Lucy.

Pandemics have a way of letting one’s true nature out of the box. With nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, the spotlight turned on us. 

One positive: I finally got around to reading Hemingway’s classic tale For Whom the Bell Tolls. By the end, I felt like Roberto, on my stomach, watching the enemy approach, awaiting the end. The other thing about Covid was realizing I could polish off a bottle of wine by myself and still rise at 6:00 a.m for a hike—that is, until Sabino Canyon shut down because of the fires. It would have done me in, if it wasn’t for juvenile fantasies of returning to masters swim at dawn to see a man I called “Hercules” in all his ripped, 6′3″ glory. But alas, the pool shut down.

I decided to have a Zoom cocktail party. As soon as I flipped the video on and saw the visage that championed my potato-farmer Eastern European stock, the graying hair, a furrowed brow that even Kim Kardashian’s aesthetician couldn’t cure, there was only one solution.

It was time to reignite that old friendship through Facebook. It had been years since I reached out to Blue Sage, but with Covid running rampant, nothing was too weird. Everything was up for grabs. Blue Sage lives in a commune in Colorado, where she has spent years perfecting the art of the homemade “gummy” edible. She wasn’t at all surprised to hear from me or dismayed by my request.

“Just Cash App me,” she said. Et voilà: I’m feeling better already.

Hilary Stunda is a Tucson transplant from Colorado. An editor and writer who longs for adventure and relishes hyperbole over facts, when she’s not concocting schemes and getaway fantasies, she’s mother to two teen boys, partner to a photographer, and a lusty epicurean.

Category: TUCSON COVID TALES