Paris Baguette Sunnyside: Diners here were different from those at Starbucks.

Every day for the past 80 days in this pandemic, I have sat on my couch in my apartment in Sunnyside, New York, with a cup of coffee and a bagel with cream cheese for breakfast (very New York, although here if you’re Jewish, you add lox to the bagel with cream cheese). I sit and muse on life. Life in general and MY life.I recall wistfully what life was like for me before the pandemic. Because I’m retired (retired for nine years now), every day I’d wake up and make a cup of coffee and sit on the couch. But at that time I felt differently, always. I always felt like I had to hurry up and go out and do something. I went outside every day, even if just to walk, to stretch my legs and catch some rays (vitamin D).

Sometimes I would walk, and sit, and have a second cup of coffee in a French (Korean) coffee shop called Paris Baguette. Then I would have a homemade mixed berry croissant. The coffee shop would be full of late-morning coffee drinkers, young adults and housewives and pretty bank clerks, some police officers and retired women and men like me. They were all happily engaged in conversation.

The people at Paris Baguette were different from the customers at Starbucks. The youngish gents and ladies at Starbucks seemed more tense somehow—more driven by the pressures of work downtown. Here in Queens, they were not driven, not driven at all.

After my second cup of coffee at Paris Baguette, I would walk to the bus stop and ride the Q32 bus to Woodside. Everyone in Queens knows what people do in Woodside.

Filipino stores

Woodside is where the Filipino stores are. There’s a store called Phil-Am where one can buy baked goods like pork siopao (six buns in a box), frozen snacks like turonitos (tiny turon with langka), breakfast pastries such as ensaymada, desserts like leche flan, ginatang mais, buko pandan, cassava cake and sapin sapin, and cooked dishes like arroz caldo, sotanghon guisado, chicken and pork embutido and pritong bangus. I went to Phil-Am to buy Mama Sita’s mixes (mix for sinigang usually) and buy suman made of cassava, then a pound or two of longganisa. I liked to get some Filipino treats like ube pastillas and hopia baboy and Sunflower crackers. Before the end of my trip, I would get two bottles of coconut juice and maybe some bottles of buko Mogu-Mogu. I would be so tired when I got home, I’d put the plastic container of guinatan in the microwave and dive into the hot, sticky purple mess of ube guinatan with white roundish globes of bilo-bilo swimming inside.

Before the pandemic and only on Sundays, I would have lunch with my Filipino friends Rose and Lala. After the 12 noon Mass, we would walk to Queens Boulevard and decide where to eat. Thai food? We’d go to Vera’s. Indian? We’d go to Cardamom. Turkish? We’d go to Sofra. Japanese? We’d go to Ariyoshi. Filipino? Kabayan or Tito Rad’s.

The author (right) with Lala David, Rose Constantino: Always ending up at Kabayan

We usually ended up at Kabayan, and we’d have the same old dishes every time: pancit bam-i, GSK (ginataang sitaw at kalabasa) and the pièce de résistance, crispy pata. How we loved to dig into that crispy pata! Then we would walk home, all stuffed. Each time, each of us would say, “Wow, busog! I have to take a nap.”

Memories of prepandemic days haunt me now. We are not under strict lockdown in Queens, New York. We are “sheltering-in-place.”

“Stay home” is the slogan, or has been the slogan since early March. We are almost three months in stay-home mode, and probably will stay that way for some time. Very difficult at first but one learns to adjust.

I have learned now to turn on my TV around noon and watch our New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo update us on the situation. “We are New York tough, New York smart, New York unified, New York disciplined and New York loving.” Our tough-sounding governor is unrelenting. I love it when he says (every day), “We are New York smart . . . and New York loving.” He sounds just like an Italian-American grandfather and grandmother. I love that about him.

Only 56 deaths!

I am impressed that as of today, there are only 56 deaths in New York as compared to mid-April, when we had more than a thousand deaths a day. Wow, this virus is something, I always say.

How did we not see this coming? The US of A, so powerful and rich and great. No, Governor Cumo says. We made a mistake. We kept looking at China. Wuhan, China. We didn’t know the virus jumped from Wuhan to Europe and then 3,000 Europeans flew into JFK and gave us coronavirus. That’s what happened!

I turn off the TV and wearily go back to my bedroom. So tired, oh so tired. I lie in bed for a three-hour nap.

Of course, I could not end my day now, postpandemic, without turning on my laptop to watch movies on Netflix. It seems like long ago but it was only in March when I discovered “Crash Landing on You,” (CLOY) the Korean drama starring the handsome Captain Ri and the winsome Seri. After watching all 17 episodes of “CLOY,” I discovered “Itaewon Class,” which it turns out, is a high school Korean drama. That’s it.

I turned off the Korean movies and went back to the Americans. So far I have tackled the “Tiger King” movie and am now on the sixth episode of “Hollywood.” So much violence, lust and greed in our old life. Maybe I’ll stay in my peaceful pandemic mode for a while longer. —CONTRIBUTED INQ