Marcelo Mainzer, Peak to Peak. Share your story of helping others during this time?

Since early in February, I have been living in Frederick helping to keep Bob alive.

I met Bob in the summer of 2018, he sold his home of 40 years and needed help clearing the place of that many years of “collecting.” When three truck and trailer loads of building materials and stuff were taken to recycling and the dump, we began to move Bob’s collected treasures which included a large antique safe, a giant elk trophy and an ore cart.

Bob is 88, he has Parkinson’s disease, cancer and a pacemaker. Bob was a midlevel training technician in the Air Force and worked as a supervisor for Ball Aerospace, metal testing division, worked in the foster care and juvenile court system, then was a school teacher for many years, Bob is one of those old guys who you know were drop dead gorgeous, handsome, when they were young.

Last November, Bob, an avid life-long hunter roped me in to an ill-planned hunting trip to about 11,500 feet, I should have known better, but my compassion for helping him won over my better judgement that his age and health made the trip nuts. 

Suffice to say it was a disaster, in my defense I did manage to bring Bob back home alive. But I digress, just wanted you to meet Bob.

As I was saying, early in mid-February I moved down here and have helped Bob with a wide variety of tasks, we’re getting ready to start planting a garden right now; although I loved and still love Ned, it became too tough to live there. 

Bob had a spare room and was in need of some help and some company. He’s told me that “you saved my life,” but he saved mine, as it turns out. 

You all know the timeline of Covid-19. If Bob didn’t offer a room, I probably wouldn’t have had anywhere else to go to shelter in place.

Stories of how people are coping.

Bob has been retired for a while, so having a lot of free time is nothing new to him, since his heart attack he has spent a lot of the last couple of years binge watching the news.

I have been and underemployed handyman and personal assistant so long that life has granted me a lot of free time to do research and promotion of EEV MD and binge watch a lot of movies and shows.

We are both doing what we have always done to cope; deal with whatever comes up as best we can.

Stories of hope. 

I Googled “stories of hope during the coronavirus pandemic,” there were over 300,000,000 results. What is happening now is what always happens during a crisis. People pull together, individuals are eager to volunteer to help in any way they can. Governments and industries share resources to address the emergencies. Living through a crisis together forms unique bonds, ask any combat vet.

When we help someone else and or allow ourselves to be helped, we write a new story of hope.

How things are in different communities?

The answer to this is different in different communities, what my reading tells me is that the pandemic has only accentuated and revealed what has been plaguing communities in this country and the world for a long time; some people have much greater access to the means to meet their needs than others.

A significantly greater number of the population is now learning to live like the working poor have for a long time; food and shelter insecurity, dire economic challenges, long periods of free time due to lack of work availability and sheltering in place, if we have a place, because we don’t have the money to go out and spend. We, the working poor, have been living this New Normal. Welcome, relax, we have been making do with less and you can too.

What if the “New” normal is what people do in a crisis, without the crisis?