My New Year’s resolution for 2019 is proving hard to keep during the lockdown. In 2018, I vowed to stop wasting food, and that’s been working well. In 2019, I decided to stop using single-use plastic bags, visions of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch dancing in my head.

But here’s what happened in the drugstore last week when I went out for a prescription, adding a few items to my basket on the way out. The young woman behind the cash desk asked, “Do you have your own bags or do you want some of ours?”

“I usually bring my own, but I’ve read conflicting stuff about what to do. So I’m afraid I didn’t bring any.”

“That’s okay. We prefer using ours,” the woman said. “It’s faster”—she looked over at the line-up—“and we don’t like having to use people’s dirty bags. I mean, who knows where they’ve been?”

So. Should you use your own bags (I do wash mine) or pack your groceries in plastic bags that make front-line workers feel more comfortable? Support long-term environmental stewardship or be nice to people at high risk of contracting the virus?

People, by the way, who also have to deal with idiots like the guy who’d tried to butt into the socially-distanced line ahead of me. After I called him out, he grudgingly got into line behind me, then hustled up to the cash desk before I’d left, thrusting out some small boxed item and telling the cashier, “I need to return this.”

“I’m sorry, we’re not doing returns right now.”

Zero to sixty. The guy immediately went off on a foul rant. I don’t care what stress he was under. We’re all under stress. I feel particularly stressed myself with our good friend in England suffering terrible complications from COVID. 

But nothing excuses abuse, and I was about to turn into That Lady from the Baroness von Sketch show—the interfering one?—when the security guard appeared. He was pleasant and large, while the man was small and got smaller as the guard backed him out the door.

All of which is to say that I’m taking home too much plastic lately from my weekly shop, contra all resolutions. Yet the fact is, following environmental protocols always involves imperfect choices.

We’ve been trying to eco-fit our house, slowly getting new LED lights while installing energy efficient windows last year in half the house to replace the leaky 105-year-old ones we’ve lived with for years. (The rest were supposed to be installed this spring. However.)

Our place was built in 1915 and it’s had only three owners in that time—with someone dying here during a previous epidemic, but that’s another story. The long-time owners before us put storm windows on top of the old ones, and of course we installed new windows during a couple of renovations. But the frames on the rest had warped and the panes were so pitted from 100 years of pollution they couldn’t be properly cleaned and gave a dimmed greyish view of the world. 

So we got new ones, energy-saving and up to environmental code. But that sent all the old windows to landfill, along with the old pot lights—not to mention the old hot water heater, which had such a bad leak in January that it shorted out the old washer and dryer, which were trucked off to a landfill as well. Everything we replaced them with was top-ranked energy-efficient, but still. 

Some things have worked out better. Over the past year, I’ve stocked up on small washable cloth bags to buy produce and started taking my own containers to the deli and fishmongers. (I love that word.) Meanwhile the kitchen is festooned nightly with washed plastic bags that I still find useful for storage, not just the latest ones but some that are now more than a year old. The suckers last. Which is the problem.

I accept the fact it’s an ongoing problem. 

But here’s the big difference lately, which I find far harder to cope with than a few extra plastic bags. I’m doing all my eco-this and repurpose-that a little frantically. Washing bags, using up leftovers, whatever. The quarantine has turned me over-efficient. Maybe the word is obsessive.

Some people say the lockdown has made them lethargic. I find I’m the opposite lately, maybe because I’ve always been a list-maker. In fact, I’m one of those people who add things to a list after they’ve done them just to check them off. 

Today’s list: breakfast, put on the stock pot for broth, spend a long morning working on my new novel, eat lunch, write this blog. After I finish the blog, I need to take care of some financial business before cooking dinner. After dinner, the plan is to clean up, read for a while then go to bed. 

Usually I’m light’s out. But when I wake up at 4 a.m. lately, there’s another list, things I brood about ranging from the big picture—how is this all going to end?—to various small matters—I forgot to get lettuce the last time I shopped—to our friend in England and his family.

People keep asking, so I’ll say that our friend has ended up suffering one of the worst complications they’ve learned can come with COVID: pulmonary embolisms. Blood clots in his lungs. A couple of the clots have detached and travelled to his brain, meaning that our friend has suffered two strokes. The first was minor, the second was bad, and left him weakened on the right side with vision problems in his right eye.  He’s also fighting what we hope are temporary problems with his short-term memory. 

The good news: he now tests negative for COVID and his blood oxygen levels are rising. He’s out of intensive care and has been taken to a neurological hospital, where they’ve put him on the highest-possible dose of blood thinners to fight the clots. If he doesn’t have another stroke, he’ll be transferred to a rehab hospital and work to get better. 

If he doesn’t. Then he’ll be transferred. After which rehab won’t go quickly. 

An ongoing struggle, all of it. Plastic bags, strokes, being nice to people, escorting idiots off the premises, adding to landfill when you’re trying to be environmentally sensitive. 

Some people claim the world is going to be different after all this. Better. Others, that there won’t be any after; that the struggle will continue. 

I suspect the second will be true, since nothing ever ends and no one ever gets all of it right. Not as an individual, not as a society.

What’s that quote from Samuel Beckett? “Try again. Fail Again. Fail better.” 

I can live with that. Me and my unwanted plastic bags.

Definition of life.