My Savior from COVID, Il Commissario Montalbano

When I should look back for the last 8 months after I stopped the work based on my office- the last patients/referrals were on Feb 10 to be precise-, I feel like it has been eternal with no end! Indeed, as my lifetime comrade Sir Peter Bell of Leicester, UK laments, “---- The trouble is that life is fairly boring as each day seems to repeat itself in a very similar way and I can’t see any end to it. The virus is now so widespread that I can’t see it ever going away so we have to learn to live with it I think-----".

As the oldest faculty member, so-called ‘super-senior’, our department admin staffs felt very uneasy to see me get back to work though not every day like other full-time guys and discouraged me to show up at the office too often, not even downtown main office but the satellite office here at Northern Virginia suburb, only to pick up the mails, etc through these many months.

Although the vaccine is NOT ready yet, not only psychologically but also medically, they seem to be better prepared now to encounter COVID than the last Spring, including our strong recommendation to choose an aggressive attitude with ‘preemptive strike’ to COVID with full anticoagulation quite earlier than any other institutes along the Eastern seaboard. And an unwritten policy of ‘DNR’ for the senior citizens like me to save/reserve the ventilators to ‘salvageable’ young peoples through the years are now pretty much eased, thank goodness!

But the quarterly virtual conference we had last Friday to update on the COVID status was quite frightening with very gloom forecast even with the vaccine and initial optimistic view is now clearly waning with further gloom picture for Year 2021! My first out of town schedule to New York on Feb 2021 for the VEITH Symposium wouldn’t be realistic and perhaps the plan to Buenos Aires on Sept 2021 as well. So I am really depressed!

So, I feel I have to stick if not reinforce the current lifestyle I was involuntarily forced to adopt including two if not three nights every week to watch the ‘detective’ story especially when Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell at MSNBC are not available.

Indeed, throughout my career, I couldn’t dare to waste(?) the time more than one if not two hours altogether every day to watch TV including nightly news and rather spent the rest of the evening for the review of the journals/books, etc to keep up with. Although my wife laughed at me all along for my attitude to becoming illiteracy hopelessly ignoring such essential cultural activity, I just felt like I couldn’t afford such luxury, especially while I was actively involved in clinical care as a full time.

But, God knows, such unexpected COVID disaster became a silver lining in the way for me to sit all day at home and do nothing productive so that I finally allowed myself to spare two to three evening every week to watch the detective story with my wife and she chose TWO entirely different series; one is ‘Il Commissario Montalbano’ played by Luca Zingaretti with 100% plus Italian/Sicilian flavor and another is ‘Commissaire Maigret’ played by the pipe-smoking detective Bruno Bremer with 100% different French flavor.

Both series are available through MHz Choice and my wife watched ‘alone’ through the years together with many other detective series but she chose these two series for many reasons and bought them- 36 episodes for Zingaretti’s Montalbano created based on Andrea Camilleri’s novels and 54 episodes for Bremer’s Maigret based on Georges Simenon’s book- indeed, there are similar series played by other actors as well but not as good as these two actors!!!-

We watched twice through the year and the second time I enjoyed more than the first time and now we are running on Montalbano for the third time this week and believe me, not only the detective story per se, close to two hours on average for each episode but also all those Sicilian sceneries, foods, cultures- Sicilian language/dialect is different from ordinary Italian language so that the Northerners from Milan/Lombardia wouldn’t be able to understand clearly- is simply outstanding.

Not only due to my unique relationship with Univ Catania colleagues but also due to my wife who fell in love with Sicily, we had many occasions to visit Sicily and even drove around every corner of the island creating so many crazy/stupid shows to amaze/frighten my Italian friends. So these stories/series were set in the imaginary town of Vigàta and filmed in the province of Ragusa, Sicily though Camilleri wrote his books based on a ‘fictionalized’ province of Agrigento so that we are so familiar with the local flavors enjoying every bit of it. I am sure many of you had a chance to visit Sicily so that I bet you would enjoy it as much as I do.

So I do make an imaginary trip to my beloved Sicily to watch/enjoy the sunny bright countryside with such beautiful blue sky and deep blue Mediterranean sea through this series of Commissario Montalbano as therapy/savior for my restlessness, perhaps another year, God forbid????

Depressed,

BB Lee