Hello, yeah, it's been awhile...
At first, it seemed like a weird, interesting foreign news story gone terribly wrong. When reporters first described an epidemic in the Wuhan province of China spreading rapidly and causing concerns, it was hard to see what was coming.
The things you realize, after the fact.
I think of Phuket, Thailand and the tsunami, the people who headed out into dry seabed as the ocean receded so far out that people couldn't believe the water had vanished from the shore. It means "run" but who knows that, in the moment?
I now feel like, maybe, I would have been one of those standing on the beach. Maybe a little too long.
As things go, I was maybe sort of lucky. Yes, the panic shopping was already underway, the virus most likely already out and about in my Westchester community, north of New Rochelle. As international travelers came home and cruise lines started to implode, it's hard not to realize that the people who live those lives and take those trips... are your neighbors. Like maybe we should worry. Like maybe we need to take some steps. We were too late. I see that now. Asking questions days, weeks after they needed to start being asked.
(And still, yesterday, the Governor of Florida finally thought, hey, maybe it's time we told that state to stay at home. Yesterday.)
Still, as I often do, I had a vacation planned for my birthday, the second week of March. Maybe a side trip to Boston to see old friends. Needless to say, that didn't happen as "the Biogen Meeting" blew up. And come the end of that week, staring down the obvious implications of an epidemic now underway in my state, in my county, in the town three towns away... suddenly, living with an 85 year old mother with complicating conditions didn't seem incidental. Not anymore.
Three weeks (and counting) later, the world is... different. In so many ways. Life is lived at home, as we do now, communicating by phone and videoconference and Zoom and watching cable news with agitation and alarm.
There are, of course, many things to be said, many observations to be made. And suddenly, again, I find myself with all the time in the world to write them down. Interesting, that. Some have suggested that Gen X is uniquely equipped to handle this epidemic... I don't feel as confident as all that. I can say that, much like Rachel Maddow and numerous friends of a certain age, living through 9/11 and the early days of the AIDS epidemic does at least give one some markers to work from as this unfolds... not necessarily good or happy ones. You learn some things about people, and groups, in emergencies. Not a lot of them are good.
I think of And The Band Played On (I really must dig up my copy from the basement) -- the story of Anthony Fauci's other big job -- and that moment when one of the CDC shouted at Blood Center execs "how many dead bodies do you need, because we can come back then" about instituting testing controls over blood donations. I think of the leaders putting off stay at home orders, keeping all kinds of falderal open, not doing enough to convince people they, too, are at risk.
I think of those panicked calls on 9/11, when people didn't know where friends, family, spouses were - on a plane, in the Tower, somewhere in Manhattan. How empty Times Square was on the morning of 9/12 (I was there, virtually alone). I look at that empty Times Square and those darkened theaters and empty hotels and I know they come back... eventually. But we are different. We are changed. We just don't know quite how. Not yet.
We try to find the light in this darkness - it's Christmas for introverts! Your cat never wanted you home this much! - but there's a lot of darkness, and so little light. We can't begin to admit, even to ourselves, a lot, how long this could go on, how bad it will get, the people we may very likely lose. Keep calm and carry on. Try to order the groceries online. Try to remember what six feet apart looks like. Try not to panic when you cough. Or someone else coughs. Try not to lie awake, mentally ticking off every cramp, every breath... because who knows if we got it. Or have it. Or will get it.
Gloria Gaynor showed us you can sing I Will Survive when you wash your hands. I mean... we will, right? And so I'm back, from outer space. Back at my desk. Back to the future. Back against the wall. I have no idea how we get through this, how we get used to the new normal. I wasn't really all that keen on the old normal. But like 9/11, like life before AIDS... it does always seem to go that you don't know what you... well, you get the idea.
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