We are living in the age of outrage, and right now a lot of it is aimed at masks. People are outraged that some are not wearing masks. Others are outraged that people are telling them they have to wear a mask. Meanwhile we are all expected to do something new and strange, all while feeling deeply afraid and upset. That ain’t easy.
 
In my opinion the outrage at people not wearing masks is well-placed, but useless. Personally, I can feel my blood pressure spiking when I see someone without a mask in public. Every stress bell in my body starts ringing. But we know that stress and immune function are related, so I’d say my outrage is counterproductive at best. 
 
If I see someone not wearing a mask, I am powerless to do anything about it, unless I want to tell them what to do. In my experience as a dog owner, telling random strangers to change their behavior is ill-advised, and maybe even dangerous. The only thing to do when you see someone with an ill-behaved dog is to leave, go, get away. Same with the unmasked. Move away from them. Take care of yourself and your family. Move along. So that’s my first tip: 
 

1. Skip the outrage. People like to think outrage is motivating, even meaningful. But it’s not. It’s really just like the windbag at the company meeting. Vocal, full of itself, but when it comes down to assigning tasks, to actually getting the work done, it falls conspicuously silent. To achieve this step, you’ve got to be humble. Be ready to back up, literally. You even have to be ready to scrap your plans. Leave the restaurant. Go back to the car. Walk the dog the other way. Basically, be ready to swallow your pride and get out of Dodge. The goal? Keep your blood pressure down and your immune system running smoothly.

 
One image has stuck with me throughout this pandemic. It’s from the Four Continents Figure Skating Championship, which took place this February. I love watching figure skating. Like opera it is a truly international art form, and the competitions take place all over the world. This one was in Seoul, South Korea. The pandemic was already happening, and everyone in the audience, and I mean everyone, was wearing a mask. Like an audience at a tennis match, their heads moved back and forth in sync to follow the action, and despite the fact that their smiles were invisible, somehow you could feel the delight coming from them. They were having a great time watching the skating, in masks.

Culturally, we rugged individualists, the Teddy Roosevelt-style Americans are at a disadvantage about this new, sudden requirement. Not because masks itch, or cost money, or represent frailty, but because who the hell are you to tell me what to do? People like to compare this to seat belts when they try to shame the non-mask wearing online, but they have amnesia about what a long, hard-fought battle it was to get seat belts in cars. (And God bless Ralph Nader, by the way, for winning it.) But really, as a nationality we don’t take well to being given orders to change our behavior, even for the Greater Good. This leads me to tip number two: 
 

1. Swallow your pride.  It’s not about you, it’s about your Grandma, or your elderly neighbor, or maybe even you, or, quite possibly, your job. The economy needs you to wear a mask. Pitch in and help. As they said during World War II, “do your bit.”

 
As a musician in my 50s, my ideas about talent have changed from when I was in my 20s. In my 20s I had the idea that talent was some kind of coronation, and I had everyone, actors and singers, ranked. But over the years I’ve seen the standings change. I've seen mega-talented singers be surpassed by the hardworking mediocre ones, and I just watched a new movie yesterday with a guy about my age whom I had categorized as a “lousy actor” back when we were young. He was excellent. What happened? He practiced. Art is a lot less mysterious than we think. Those who do it regularly get better at it. The same is true for wearing a mask. You know how to get better at wearing it? By wearing it. This leads me to my final tip:
 

1. Practice. Of course you want to tear the mask off as soon as you get home, but if you really want to get used to it, try wearing one when you don’t need to. I quickly learned that just putting on a mask and leaving it on is much less unpleasant than taking it on and off and worrying about it. Just get used to it. Buy one you like, or several, and wear them. If you go out, leave it on. And if you aren't going out much, occasionally even wear one around the house. Especially wear them while you are doing things you enjoy so you imprint that mask = pleasant. You may also find that there are times to wear it that are useful. Wearing a mask while gardening I spared myself from hay fever and was able to garden much longer and more comfortably than I usually do. Vacuuming is a great time to wear a mask to spare your lungs, likewise dusting. 

 
The great trumpeter Wynton Marsalis said that when he was young his father told him, “If you want to be really special, do something that nobody else wants to do: practice.” His father was the great pianist Ellis Marsalis, who passed away in March from complications from COVID 19. 
 
In honor of him, let’s take his advice. Let’s practice.
 
A few other thoughts on comfort:
 
I don’t like the feeling of loops behind my ear so I’m wearing a mask that attaches around the back of my head. If you are the same way, you can adapt an ear mask to take the pressure off with a clip or a simple piece of elastic with two buttons well sewn on: Buy Ear Saver on Etsy or Buy Plastic Clips on Amazon
 
I put a drop or two of essential oil on the inside of my mask when I go out. I find it makes it very pleasant to wear, and if I choose something like lavender, it helps calm me down from the stress of being out. For associating with the mask as something pleasant, this is a great trick. No profit for me, just a good local store I love that delivers nice oils: https://lhasakarnak.com
 
You probably know the soapy glasses trick by now to keep from fogging, but here it is just in case: Tips on Defogging Glasses
 
For women especially,  the expectation that we smile all the time, no matter how we are feeling, is very real. Yes, it’s uncomfortable to wear a mask, but the silver lining here is some the time off from people-pleasing. More thoughts on this here: Times Article on Smiling and Mask Wearing
 
Lastly, let’s take inspiration from those figure skating fans. We will find our way back to doing the things we love, and we will enjoy them, all while wearing a mask. Because…

                 1. We won’t waste energy being outraged. 
 
                2. We won’t take it personally. 
 
                           And 
 
                3. We’ll get pretty good at it!
 

​At 5:04 p.m. on October 17th, 1989, I was at work, standing in the center of a bookstore called A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books. The name was a quote from Hemingway, but that didn’t stop customers from correcting the grammar almost daily. “It should be a clean well litplace for books,” they would say with a disapproving smirk as I rang up their purchases at the cash register. Six years before Amazon began its selling books online, and well before internet omnipresence, being a bookstore clerk made me a kind of semi-deity. Someone who could open the gi-normous tomb ofBooks in Printand leaf through its onion skin pages to obtain information on a precious, hard to find volume. I loved that job. My coworkers were smart and funny, but with a veneer of cynicism that was only a pose, overlain atop a sweet vulnerability. Or perhaps I only saw it that way. I was a newlywed. Late that August I’d said my vows. I was also a budding opera singer working a stone’s throw from the greatest opera house in the world. I’d say I was rather aglow with love in all directions. 

​When the quake came our customers did something astounding. They ran out of the store, straight into the traffic of Van Ness Avenue. Cars came skidding to a stop and people jumped back onto the sidewalk in relief and embarrassment. Perhaps they didn’t know that we stood on bedrock, a pretty good place to be at a time of seismic catastrophe. And they probably did not know that the owners of the store, in their infinite wisdom, had built all the shelves at a slight declining angle into the wall. When the shaking stopped, not a single book had fallen.
            
I don’t remember if we closed or if I finished out my shift, but about an hour after the quake I headed home, walking along Van Ness in the growing dusk. This was the days before cell phones, and the chatter among people was constant, and rife with rumors and hubbub. The bridge collapsedwas something I heard and discounted. It was not possible, or so I thought. A few blocks west, a man with a shopping cart full of his possessions had a transistor radio, and a couple of people were huddled around it, listening to the news. A man in an expensive suit. A woman with a small child. I joined them. We listened together for some time. KGO, as always, was the voice of reason, calm, and solid information. Yes, in fact, part of the bridge had fallen. It was a strange, but quite beautiful moment of community, the cluster of us.
            
I stepped away and continued up Van Ness. It was now almost dark, but many of the lights were out so it was darker than San Francisco usually is at that hour. The adrenalin began to be reabsorbed into my body as I walked faster. My brow furrowed against the strangely warm air as I began to realize this was much more than a hiccup. My ignorance swept over me. My husband was at a baseball game. The World Series. He, my brother, and my brother-in-law were all there. They’d been thrilled to go, even though the seats were fairly high up in the stands. I pictured the rough old concrete of Candlestick Park which seemed to wobble even in a stiff wind. Would it survive? 
​
The rest of my walk was a worried blur. I arrived home at our apartment on Clay Street between Larkin and Hyde. I went straight in and found our cat, Boomer, scared out of his wits, but just fine. A bookshelf had emptied but the apartment looked fine otherwise. I called my sister in the east bay. She was seven months pregnant, and fine. Mom was fine. Dad was fine. Everybody was fine. She and I speculated about what our husbands would do. She said news was coming in of traffic ground to a halt because of a collapse of the Nimitz freeway. The casualties would turn out to be in the dozens. I thought, I hoped, my husband, brother, and brother-in-law would make their way to me, but how would they get here? Were the busses running? I grabbed a pack of cigarettes – yes, opera singers smoke sometimes, especially when there are earthquakes – and headed down to the street, where I smoked and chatted with my neighbors.
            
After several hours my husband arrived home. I will never forget the look on my brother-in-law’s face before I had the chance to tell him that my sister, his wife, was fine. It is the only time I have ever seen him scared. 
            
I tried to convince my brother and brother-in-law to stay with us. The world seemed a scary place and I was glad to have them back in my circle. But they decided to make their way across the Bay.

The power was out in our little apartment, and would stay out for days due to damaged substations. That part of San Francisco is just at the bottom of the ritzy Nob Hill, but truly it is closer to the Tenderloin, which is why it is jokingly called “the Tender Nob.” Feathers were ruffled over the coming days as power went back on in the wealthier neighborhoods first, but we waited, and waited. The Tenderloin’s power came on last. 
Eventually I went back to work. Those days I had the duty of ordering the books for opera and music section, an honor I abused terribly, ordering every book I was interested in until finally they took the assignment from me. That era was a pinnacle of glory for the opera. The season before I had heard La Bohème with none other than Luciano Pavarotti and Mirella Freni, a performance so convincing and impeccable it caused me never again to lament casting grand sized opera singers in the role of young lovers. A month before the quake I had seen the great Jessye Norman in recital, and the season had opened with a sexy, smashing Luluand Sam Ramey at the peak of his voice as Mefistofeles. In general the San Francisco Opera in late eighties offered a series of performances I feel proud and lucky to have beheld, very often grabbing a sandwich after work at the bookstore, and spending the evening leaning on the rail behind the orchestra section flanked by my fellow standees. 

The performance scheduled for the night of the Quake was cancelled. Subsequent performances took place at the Masonic Auditorium and later the Civic Center as a substantial repairs and seismic retrofit were performed on the War Memorial Opera House, a place many in the city and music-loving community of the Bay Area consider almost a person, at least a friend. But opera fans put up with the inconvenice, and the cavernous acoustics elsewhere. Even later, back at the opera house, most of us took a moment before the curtain rose to look up at the tight meshed net that seemed to defy the gravity of the crumbled ceiling. But like the city in 1906, San Francisco Opera showed itself to be the comeback King. 
​
The actual tragedies touched me only peripherally. When I went to my Italian lesson the day after the Quake, my teacher was in tears. His friend had been one of those who died in the Marina, a neighborhood built on landfill that had fared quite poorly. A good friend from high school had exited the Nimitz freeway less than a minute before it collapsed. But the worst had been spared to those closest to me and I felt that mixture of relief and guilt common to all survivors. 
            
Two years later, when a firestorm engulfed the Oakland Hills, I was living on the East Coast. At first I paid small attention to the news of “a fire in California.” It’s a big state, it could’ve been anywhere. Then I realized it was directly above my parents’ home and I watched the news in horror. In the end, my parents’ home was just below the evacuation line, and though my brother had hosed down the roof and they had stood and watched the hillside burn, they were safe, as was the grand lady of the Claremont Hotel, a landmark most of us East Bay natives consider iconic.
            
Since then, disaster has become more common, and more personal. Two years ago, in the weeks following fires here, we suffered a noxious and oppressive air quality for days, and shortly following that my cousin, young, healthy, and in his early forties, died suddenly of a heart problem. He was not technically a victim of the fire, but in my mind the events are forever linked. And I have two friends who lost everything to fire, or rather almost everything. They left with the clothes on their back, and their dogs. Their strength in the aftermath has amazed me. I don’t pity them, because I have seen them triumph.
            
The months following the Quake, the book Fifteen Seconds positively flew off the shelf in the bookstore. A hastily published paperback coffee table book, it encapsulated the worst events of the Quake, and it was one of those times in the bookstore trade that one book absolutely took over a section of the industry. When that book came out, I’d say all of San Francisco wanted a copy. And I can understand why. The mind needs help after an event like that. It seems almost unreal. Looking at those pictures, of fallen buildings, of people gathered, it lets you know, yes, this happened. But unlike the scrolling infinity of misery we all see every day on our phones, that book was finite. A frightening, tragic encapsulation that you could pick up when you needed to consider what had happened, but was also comforting because you could finish it, and put it down.
            
CNN was founded in 1980, so it was up and running for the evens of ’89, and ’91. But the world’s population had not yet jumped aboard the 24/7 news cycle, nor did we all have cell phones, creating our own, more intimate version of 24/7. So there was a way in which these catastrophes trickled in, just as I waited in the darkened apartment for news of my husband, families waited, communities waited, cities waited. And it was in that window of not knowing that barriers came down. The number of homeless individuals in San Francisco has reached huge proportions lately, but it is far from a new problem. And people interact with each other in different ways about that. Some stop, to offer solace, or money. And sometimes a person asks for money. But when was the last time you stopped a homeless person to ask for a favor? In that moment on Van Ness, the man with the shopping cart was our lifeline for a few moments, and in those few moments our “status”, if you will, was reversed. That, I think, is the great gift of these catastrophes. Things that are artificial, or unimportant, disappear. 

​My family is different now, since we lost our cousin. And even these larger catastrophic events, (among which many of my friends and family include a frightening and tyrannical presidency,) these things have the ability to shake us out of our routines, to make us feel an existential human fear, not only for ourselves, but for our loved ones. I will never forget that look on my brother-in-law’s face. At least I hope I never will. Because it reminds me of the truth: we are all of us hanging by the thinnest of threads. Once we know that, or remember it, the only option is to be as kind and as helpful as we possibly can.

​When you’re a kid you eat what’s there. If your Mom doesn’t buy soda, you don’t drink soda. If your Mom doesn’t buy sugared cereals, you don’t eat sugared cereals.

If your Mom calls you from work, and talks you through how to roast a chicken, you learn how to roast a chicken, sort of. If you’re all alone and there’s nothing around for lunch, you scrounge every dresser top, sofa cushion, and penny jar to put enough together for a liquor store salami sandwich. Or if your Mother buys roughly three dozen boxes of Chex cereal because it’s on sale, and stacks them up to the ceiling in the pantry, and the stack frightens you, looming over your childhood and extending into your future, so you imagine you are eighteen and going off to college but still eating stale bargain Corn Chex, then that’s what you eat.

And finally, if you complain about the somewhat haphazard arrangement for your sustenance, and your Mother takes out her handy fifteen-inch-long yellow legal pad, and makes a list, and posts it on the refrigerator for you and your siblings to read, and entitles it: “Food in the House When You Said There Was No Food in the House,” then you will darn well eat what is in the house, and like it. Even if the list includes things like canned pears. And corn starch.
 
You may have guessed by now that I am not talking about your Mother, I’m talking about my Mother. A wonderful, industrious woman who would sometimes make us apple crisp, beef stew, or “schnecken,” which are little Jewish cream cheese pastries rolled up with cinnamon and sugar. But other times, overworked and overtired, and probably suffering from the thyroid condition that now troubles me, Mom would come home from work and request either a Dubonet on the rocks or some fresh squeezed orange juice, and us kids would get it for her, and then fend for ourselves. And all kidding aside, we did pretty well. I learned to love food. I learned to love cooking. I even learned to love cleaning up, which often included a water fight and a very wet kitchen floor. 
            
What I didn’t learn was which foods I liked. Or rather, which foods I was allowed to say I preferred. Being the youngest, you learn how to take leftovers, which is how I learned to love burned popcorn, because at least I could count on being able to move my hand into the bowl to get it without competition. So it was a lightening bolt when my sister gave up meat for a couple of weeks, and I discovered that vegetarianism was a thing. I realized that I hadn’t liked meat for years, and I stopped eating it. It was 1978.
I am pretty sure my family thought I was just copying big sis, like usual, and were surprised when I stuck with it. And I was copying big sis, for sure. But I was also discovering the power of saying, “no.”
            
Doggy Dan is an online dog trainer, with a website full of excellent free material, or reasonably priced courses that will probably change your life, and your dog’s life, for the better. And Doggy Dan says, “The pack leader controls the food.” 

One of my dogs is a lab, so of course he will eat anything, at anytime, anywhere. But little Gadget is my pretty, picky Papillon. And Doggy Dan says he’s playing games with me. Walking away from the bowl when I put it down. Rubbing his cute little nose raw to bury his food instead of eating it. Giving a discreet little growl when I try to take away a bone he has discarded. These are all signs, so says Doggy Dan, of him controlling the food. And that doesn’t work. It sets off a host of other behavioral problems. Why? Because food is the most important thing in a dog’s life, and whoever controls it is in charge. Period. 
           
So these days, I don’t leave any food around for the dogs, nor bones. I eat first. I even do a little fake gobbling over each of their bowls before I put them down. And if Gadget walks away from his bowl with his nose in the air like a fluffy little prince, I take the bowl away, right away, and he’s got to wait till the next meal. Who’s in charge of the food? I am.
            
This new lectin-free diet I am trying is not easy. It is highly restrictive. No this, no that. But I think that is why I am so moved by the experience of trying it. How many women reading this struggle to say a simple, two-letter word? “No.” 
            
What I mean to say, by comparing the dogs and my childhood kitchen, is that we get into habits. Food habits. And they may be good for us, or they may be really, really bad for us. 
            
Unfortunately, food habits are among the most sensitive topics for people, and when you change your diet, it can be upsetting to others. To this day, I still don’t think my family is thrilled that I am a vegetarian, and they still make that known in subtle ways, which in turn bother me, so we are all a little bothered about it. But give us time. It’s only been forty years. But seriously, people often take a substantial dietary change as an implicit criticism. I have been verbally attacked by meat eaters before I could get half a word out, and the only reason I can imagine is that they felt attacked by me. What I was doing was different than what they were doing, and because of that, they thought I was saying they were wrong.
            
But there is a more kindly negative reaction that people have as well, which is concern for my health, and perhaps also just a generalized worry that if everybody goes about evolving their own, quirky little diets, the fabric of society will become unraveled. Food brings us together. When I eat differently, I set myself apart.
            
There is also the ideal reaction, which is one of curiosity and empathy. Curiosity for what I’m doing (rather than jumping to assumptions or stereotypes), and empathy for the fact that obviously if I felt terrific, I wouldn’t be changing a thing.
            
I myself sometimes fall in that second group, wondering how the fabric of society can stay strongly woven with all these individualized threads. But at this point in history, we are all our own special melting pots, genetically diverse within ourselves, living in diverse communities, and there is no reason to assume that every stomach should be able to happily eat “whatever’s in the kitchen”, metaphorically speaking. Chinese food one night, staff dinner the next, pizza another, the latest fad breakfast, your favorite habitual lunch. 
            
When communities were more homogenous, people ate together daily and evolved dietary choices that made sense to them, and their stomachs. These evolutions took millennia, and included elaborate methods of food preparation, many of them designed thoughtfully to remove the parts of foods which are often less digestible. What are those parts called? I’m so glad you asked. They’re proteins, and they’re called Lectins. Recent news coverage has mistakenly reported that all lectins are removed during cooking, any cooking, but this is not so.

Human beings spent thousands of years learning how to get the bran off of rice, only to have some genius declare that because of the vitamins we might miss, we’d better start eating the whole grain again. Too bad my stomach didn’t get the memo. And many of the traditions could still work, if we did them. When I was taught to cook beans, I was taught to soak them overnight, rinse them, then cook them at high heat while skimming away the foam that appears on the surface of the pot, and then change the water, and then boil them for hours and hours. But I’m guilty of shortening that process considerably. And I often simply throw rice in a pot with water and cook it, without any soaking at all. My Persian neighbor once made me rice, and I lost count of the numbers of times she rinsed, soaked, and changed the water. All I know is that she had begun the process days before our dinner, and that the rice was fluffy and absolutely delicious. 
            
I don’t care about getting into an argument with food purists, or friends who read alarming articles and tell me “lectins are fine, and the diet is bad.” Because for a decade now I have noticed that the “better” I eat, the worse I feel. All the whole grains and varied fruits and vegetables seem to make me sicker and sicker and sicker. So I have my own experience to guide me. Anything can look good or bad on paper. But every bodyis different. The same way I could have gone undiagnosed my whole life if I had believed my first blood test, which came back “normal”, my health is too important a task to farm out to popular consensus, or even traditional medical knowledge. My body is not lying to me. A raw vegan diet brought me enormous pain, and close to the brink of despair. And yes, I supplemented B12. So that’s me.

So I’ve decided on taking a fairly radical step forward with my diet, and because of my “better” makes me worse paradox, the work of Dr. Gundry— who is among other things a specialist in infant organ transplants so he’s hardly a snake oil salesman— the idea of a diet which focuses specifically on how things are prepared, and which kinds of things tend to bother people, made such innate sense to me that the moment I read about it, I experienced a feeling of coming to ground. Even before I had any problems of my own, I was well-versed in my Dad’s “bad” stomach, and knew well that he couldn’t tolerate tomatoes, chilis, sunflower seeds. All high lectin foods. 

But I am four days in. I don’t know if this will work, or not. But if it doesn’t, I’ll try something else. There’s a phase in life when you realize you are the one who gets to make the decisions, and then there’s a period after that when you realize you’re also allowed to change your mind, and that’s when freedom comes rushing in the door. If I need to change directions, I will. If I need to adapt or revise these choices, I will. If I need to eat some old comfort food in a moment of painful nostalgia (with a digestive enzyme to help me process it), then I will. Because it’s my stomach. And my life. And because Doggy Dan is right.

​The pack leader controls the food.

-LH