At a press conference today Gov. Inslee told everyone to call the older people in their lives and ask them “not to be going to dinner parties, and coffee klatches, and sewing needle get-togethers," which is the right thing to do for our health and for the health of the people we love.

But while you're following the Governor's orders and scolding the olds in your life, I suggest you do so in a charming way full of particular personal details! Nobody will believe you love them otherwise. Among other things, Frank O'Hara's "Having a Coke With You," which you can find in his beautifully uneven collected works, available at local bookstores, accomplishes a romantic version of this task. Find inspiration here and tailor your declaration of love accordingly.

A few thoughts:

• If you're new to the poem, you're just going to have to blow past all those initial European city names and get to the good stuff. The whole point there is just for him to say that spending time with his boyfriend is more fun than going on vacation, and then to joke about how traveling can kind of suck anyway. A welcome message in quarantine, for certain. Imagine being sick to your stomach on a foreign street and not knowing where the trusty bathrooms are. Just imagine.

• The poem is about how real-life experiences trump art every time, as life is an unmediated experience. But more than that, it's about the urgency of telling the people you love how much you love them, as he writes in the last few lines, "it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience / which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I'm telling you about it." Of course, the inescapable contradiction here is that O'Hara is relaying this message via poem, which is a very mediated experience. This is all to say: when you're having a Coke with your loved one in a Zoom room or over the phone this weekend, embrace the medium! Like reading a poem, talking to someone on the phone or on a vid chat is a real experience, after all.

• O'Hara started selling postcards at MOMA and worked his way up to become associate curator. He mostly ran with the abstract expressionist painters and helped popularize their work. He wrote poems on his lunch breaks and eventually became one of the most influential poets who ever lived. He died tragically after being hit by a jeep on Fire Island. The lesson: don't go to the beach with all your friends right now!!!

• I have read this poem maybe 700 times in my life, and to this day I still have no idea what O'Hara means when he says "in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth / between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles." And yet somehow it's my favorite line in the poem. Here O'Hara channels his close friend, the late John Ashbery, who mastered poetry's ability to sound like it makes sense even when it doesn't. I don't really know what it means for a tree to breathe through its spectacles—its leaves? or does it have glasses on?—but the sentence rhythm tells me it's one of the most natural and ancient intimacies imaginable.