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One Door Down : Profiles from a New York City Apartment Building During the COVID-19 Pandemic Main Menu About Our Profiles George and Kathy Profile Sonia and Paul Profile Mary Profile Leeat and Uwvie Profile Jo Profile Tyler Profile Methodology and Background

George and Kathy Recall Their Virtual Vacations Transcript

Kathy: You know I was thinking about retiring, I had been actually thinking of retiring for three years. I can’t do any of the things I wanted to do. For years I’d thought “oh my gosh!” I want to take, I was the only one though, I want to take a three-month cruise around the world and see different ports, and do a lot of different things but it’s like now you think about oh my god a cruise ship is like a floating petri dish with all of these people in it and that’s the last thing people wanted to do at that point. So yeah, I had a lot of adjustments I had to make with what type of plans I would have. You know, not just in the house watching murder and mayhem shows and, yanno, YouTube videos. It’s like you can only do so much of that.

Tyler: You can only fall down so many rabbit holes on YouTube.

Kathy: Oh my gosh and you do! (Tyler: Yeah.) You just go from one to another and before you know it six hours had past and you haven’t washed the dishes from breakfast, right?

Tyler: For me I guess during the pandemic nothing felt more comfortable than doing that. Just kind of taking in all of the outside world that I couldn’t get while in a stay-at-home order.

George: Uh, our life prior to that was we would like to take advantage of our uh off time from work and go on vacations and visit a lot of places. Yanno we’ve been to China, we’ve been to Russia, we’ve been to Europe. And you know, and we’ve taken a lot of cruises, as Kathy said before it’s uh it’s a petri dish.

Tyler: Yeah.

George: In the initial onslaught, they had people o-on the ship and they refused to let them off and everything like that, so I said “well, (chuckling) it doesn’t look like a good environment to be in.”

Tyler: Yeah.

George: Basically, we kind of isolated ourselves and our window on the world, like you said was YouTube. Yanno, we-we would take virtual trips. You could take a hike down to the Grand Canyon, to the river on YouTube (chuckling) and follow somebody. Or take a walk through the streets of some cities in Europe. So it was kind of, you know, a virtual vacation.

Tyler: I really love the concept of the virtual vacation. I think that there’s something really like, cute there. Really it’s…

George: Oh okay! (Laughing) Basically, um you can see the world!

Tyler: Yeah!

George: You can go, you can go anywhere through-through other people’s eyes and, uh take in their experiences. So, we did that for a while “okay lets-let’s take a hike down the Grand Canyon.” We’ve been there many times so, so it was kind of like a a revisit. It was nice. It’s nothing like being there, (Tyler: Yeah.) but experiencing uh the hike was a lot easier than actually doing it. I-I-I’ve never walked all the way down (laughing) to the Grand Canyon because the problem Is walking back up! I-I’ve walked down uh yanno maybe a half hour and the climb back up took three hours! He was able to do it within a matter of an hour or an hour-and-a-half and he was moving briskly and I said “wow!” And you can experience all the scenery and, as he was walking through. So that that was kind of neat. And, and also yanno wandering through uh different cities: Rome, what, what is it?

Kathy: Venice. We looked a lot in Venice.

George: Yeah, yeah.

Kathy: There’s a lot of live cameras too, and you know its like you can look at live cameras all day and see what things are going on in different areas.

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George and Kathy
George and Kathy have lived and rented out apartments in this building for decades. The entire time, George’s older sister, Mary, lived in the unit above them. In recent years, Mary had been diagnosed with dementia, and required care that entailed the assistance of her brother and sister-in-law. In an effort to both make her happy and get her blood flowing, they would take her out to restaurants and treat her to other outings that did not require too much effort on her part. Theirs being a close-knit family, George and Kathy stepped up to the plate when Mary needed them most.
In the early months of the pandemic, Mary developed symptoms that seemed very similar to those of COVID. Unable to get a proper diagnosis due to no doctor being able to come see her, she was diagnosed with complications from heart failure, and after a two-week illness, died at home on March 29th, 2020.
In this clip, George and Kathy recount their experience after Mary got sick, and their role in taking care of her before she died. They go on to talk about the difficulties they experienced after she died, and how it impacted them.

Transcript

During the pandemic, both George and Kathy continued to work, but for Kathy, under much different circumstances. She had been employed in a hospital for over 20 years delivering vaccines to workers, among other employee-centric care duties. She became concerned about acquiring COVID from one of the workers that she would inevitably treat. Kathy had been considering retirement before the onset of the pandemic, but this made the decision simple. She signed all the paperwork for retirement, but was offered an opportunity to continue working part-time in a remote capacity; she accepted.
Taking on this new position placed Kathy within her own home, all by herself while George continued to go to work. Her biggest concern during the transition was facing issues with her computer; at the hospital she could just have the I.T. department fix it, but at home, she depended on a more tech-savvy George, accessible only through a phone call. She began to miss her friends at the hospital, but couldn’t visit on a social call; it was far too busy.
In this clip, Kathy talks about how she made the transition from working in the hospital to working from home, the loneliness it entailed, and how taking in Jo’s cat while she stayed in Austin, Texas helped her to cope with it.

Transcript
George began working at the post office in Queens as a mail carrier, but desired a job working in maintenance or engineering. Carrying mail proved to be a short-lived enterprise, as he worked his way up the ladder to achieve his goal, now handling maintenance for automated processing machinery. He takes pride in his job, as he views the mail service as an integral part of public services. When COVID hit and people began depending more and more on the delivery of packages of varying degrees of importance, from an Amazon impulse buy to life-preserving medications, George and his team were there to ensure that they were delivered.
With the stay-at-home order in place, George recalls the monotony of going to and from work and nowhere else. He was never very concerned by crowded situations as he never came across them; each shift’s crew would give time and space for the previous one to clear out so as to prevent transmission between groups. George’s crew made a heightened effort to ensure they wouldn’t spread the virus, spot-cleaning their work stations before they went home.

Recently, one of Kathy’s friends who remained working at the hospital reached out to her and said it feels like it’s been years since they’ve seen her. Kathy, who claims a distorted sense of time after the pandemic, responded, “For me it’s felt like two months.” She feels as if her mindset right after leaving the hospital has remained with her. George also admits that he has not seen some friends in two years, citing the pandemic as the main cause. George and Kathy’s friends shared an annual Christmas card exchange that saw the two send out close to one-hundred cards a season. Now, they say they’ve only received around twenty.
While their friendships may change, the bond that they share remains strong. On Kathy’s working from home, George is happy to have her around more often. When they both worked in person, they rarely ever crossed paths for more than a few waking hours. Now, they have much more time to spend together.
Vacation-goers, the two have traveled the world together. COVID derailed any plans for them to continue doing so, but they’ve acclimated. In this clip, Kathy recounts how COVID altered her retirement plans, and how they continued to experience exotic places from their couch.

Transcript
From now on, George asserts, any vacation will have to be a road trip.

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