A Bag Of Beans, A Pound Of Rice & Chi

What’s In Your COVID-19 Pantry?

By Denise Emanuel Clemen, Minneapolis, Minnesota

I began preparing my pantry when the newspapers began advising us to do so. Not a fan of canned goods or prepared food, I didn’t have much of a pantry. It was so deficient the first thing I bought was a set of stacking cubes to serve as additional shelving. For the past few weeks every shopping trip has included a handful of pantry items.

Back when I was a Californian I put my faith in my emergency backpack with its batteries, hand crank radio and phone charger. Also stuffed into that red pack was a flashlight, headlamp, first aid supplies, toiletries, tinfoil blankets, poncho and a nice wad of cash. Other than a few pouches of water and some nuts, I didn’t pack much food. I figured I could crowbar my way through the earthquake rubble and pay cash for a meal or a bag of groceries. When California exploded with the worst fires in its history two years in a row, I added smoke masks to my pack.

This afternoon with everything in Minnesota cancelled, a national state of emergency declared, and my inbox jammed with bad news about things I’d been looking forward to, I moseyed to the neighborhood Trader Joe’s for another round of pantry stocking.

Wait. There were no canned goods. Except green jackfruit – whatever that is. No eggs, no bread. A meager supply of nuts. Even the produce bins were empty, except for sweet potatoes and some bags of blood oranges. Shoppers shuffled through the aisles like Stepford wives, staring into the distance or into their phones, texting, Uh…Should I get some cans of green jackfruit?

Somehow, I left the store with a bag almost too heavy to carry. My pantry now has all the usual stuff plus dried blueberries and canned hearts of palm. My freezer is a pantry too – homemade soups and broths, and a few jumbo packs of TJ’s smoked salmon and way too much butter. Living in a building with 375 condos, I’m confident that neighbors will look out for one another. I should be able to trade that butter for something.

What I’m most happy to have in reserve are my practices. Practicing T’ai Chi Chih daily, and yoga almost as often, I feel prepared for the stresses that may present themselves. I begin my TCC practice in my pajamas as soon as I get out of bed. Often yoga follows. Without having already stocked up on that routine, I doubt that I could muster my attention away from the crashing stock market and rocketing virus graphs. When I invariably wake at 3:00 a.m. to worry about everything, it’s the Nei Kung, I pull out of my emergency backpack of practices.

We have at the ready the things we made ready. You can’t buy a can of beans or a can of peaches when the shelves are empty. T’ai Chi Chih – learned, practiced and at the ready – is an endless bounty.