What would Agnes do (WWAD) during the coronavirus pandemic? Agnes had an uneasy way of placing wedge occurrences in her life, like being married, onto the long arc of history. Her pastimes, smoking and drinking, fit nicely into an imaginative destiny all her own. She believed she was meant to smoke, meant to drink, that they were a sign of the times and not to be missed because of some pollyannaish medical or social admonition about motherhood. Nothing would have stood in the way of her scotch, beer and Marlboros. She was destined to have them.

Along side the subliminal moral compass WWJD (What Would Jesus Do), I act and react from a Pavlovian response to my mother’s teaching, character and personality. WWJD helped replace a lot of the bad stuff with certain social mores, like not stealing and staying sober. Stealing and drinking came so naturally to Agnes that by the time it occurred to me my mother might be setting a bad WWAD example, she’d already shut the door on self-reckoning. And I had to suffer through reckoning of my own.

She would have loved being in the midst of a pandemic, entering the shutdown as if it were a fun house full of reasons to drink jumping out at every turn. If I had said we must social distance ourselves, she would have said, “Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” No earthly situation of hers held destiny captive. She would have known the virus and all that went with it were temporary disruptions to help justify consuming more alcohol, smoking more cigarettes.

It’s not that Agnes was a rule-breaker. It’s that the rules didn’t apply to her in the first place. She would not have adhered to mask wearing, six-foot distancing and certainly not staying in her lane at the grocery store. She would have swallowed up the news, argued over every tidbit, insisting she was right and driven everyone in the house to their corners.

Medical appointments cancelled? School conferences shut down? What a relief! Except for clothes shopping, motherly obligations drove her nuts. Curling up on the couch with her beer, cigarettes, a mystery novel or the New Yorker were her destiny. She raged against anyone who tried interrupting her routine or attempted to rearrange her destined spot in the universe. Being told to stay home would have been the only rule she’d have upheld and savored.

WWAD hasn’t left me completely. Cozying up to the couch reading mysteries and the New Yorker is fine with me for as long as it takes. I love her for that hard-wired legacy.

But thank God I’ve ditched the booze and the cigarettes.