A further sign of the times

My sister called yesterday early in the morning (for her) and I answered and we had a 50-minute chat; I hadn't spoken with her since Christmas.  Her daughter's family has moved in with her and it's going pretty well, these are times when we all have to do what we can to take care of each other.

Her whole household was pretty sick last month but no one was able to get a test for the Coronavirus no matter how symptomatic they were--they all ran implacably up against the impenetrable barrier of answering negatively to the qualifying question of, "Have you traveled to China recently?"  Hence No Test (hence no containment or mitigation)--only here in Trump's America; it's like in three short years we have become a third world banana republic bereft of the acumen and advantages of the industrialized world.

My niece has a two-year old who my sister watches while the baby's parents are at work on shortened hours, money is tight everywhere and that might be our new forever-normal in Trump's Amerika.  Shelves are bare in the supermarkets in her town, even canned goods have been picked clean, and there are no baby wipes to be bought anywhere in her locale so the three adults are frantically trying to toilet train the resisting toddler, and turning to using paper towels and other such articles of necessity.

When I went on yesterday's supermarket run here in the DC area, I had the misfortune of losing another ten percent of my 401K even while I shopped but I had the good fortune to find a 10-pack of hand soap bars in the CVS (the supermarket didn't have a single soap bar for sale), ten rolls of TP and several packets of 72-count gentle (no alcohol) baby wipes, and I bought two packs of wipes and boxed them up in a small book mailer for shipment to my sister's house in the west.  I was shocked to find the post office cost to ship the small, thin cardboard box of about two pounds would be $30, so I settled on the nearby UPS store cost of $15 to ship the $4 worth of baby wipes, to get there on Monday.

I was later talking to another sister who set me straight on how backwards I am, how twentieth century I have remained, when she asked if I'd looked on-line for the wipes, which I hadn't.  She has Amazon Prime, she said, and I could have found them on-line and told her and she would have ordered them and had them shipped for free to my western sister's address and I could have paid back my sister later.

The nineteen dollar cost for 144 baby wipes could have been reduced to their natural cost of four dollars, delivered, if only I would crawl into the 21st century.  I hope my niece and her husband, being smart millennials, don't tell my sister how stupid I am when the aid package arrives and they intuit its cost, which otherwise I am happy to bear if the wipes prove to be helpful.