Quarantine Diary #13 3/26/2020

What do you miss?  What, in our new pandemical world do you miss most from our pre-pandemical world?You know, the one we lived in till two weeks ago?

I don’t mean the heartbreaking realities such as safe medical care providers and enough places to go should one become ill and the loved ones that we are losing.

I just mean, what are we getting used to? Or trying to get used to. What might we never go back to?

I am observing how complicated getting groceries has become. Last week we placed an online order and the earliest we could pick it up was three days later. So, logically, Monday while eating stuff we bought Saturday, we made a new list. This earliest assured time to get it would be via delivery to us Friday night at 8:00. We looked at each other and shrugged. It isn’t like we have Friday night plans. 

Maybe a routine will fall into place around this but it feels onerous to be this proactive about groceries. Then, of course, one thinks about people who don’t have paychecks, don’t have income, are generally poor, or who live in harm’s way most of the time. 

So get over yourself, Danielson. 

But I really do miss not thinking about groceries five days before I need them.

(Since I wrote this, a friend mentioned in an email that she is connected to Instacart. She got what she ordered one hour after she ordered it for a 5% surcharge.  Which is less than we are paying.  I guess we are figuring this out together, right?)

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I miss the background bustle of the world.  I miss knowing there are people at work, kids at school, customers scrounging endcaps at Target, singers at choir rehearsals, board members at boards. I even miss sports enthusiasts in stadiums. Though did you know authorities are pinning the disastrous Coronavirus calamity in Italy and now to Spain to ONE big soccer game (Italy vs Spain) played in Bergamo two days before the first infections began? https://time.com/5809848/game-zero-soccer-game-italy/

Yesterday I walked to, through, and then back home from downtown Waukesha. In that whole 70-minute walk I only passed five people and two of them were with each other. Most everything downtown is closed except for the exotic fish store. In case you suddenly need tetras? I also walked by the liquor store and thank God it’s open. I bet one can place an order and pick it up in less than four days... 

The quietness is unsettling. I’ve read that explorers and traders in north America in the 1600’s and 1700’s would sometimes come upon native villages where houses still stood, crops were growing, dogs were wandering, but all the inhabitants were lying where they had died. We won’t come to that but this quietness rings a warning.

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Today (while walking, what else do I do?)  I saw three adults standing six feet from each other while talking and laughing. They all waved to me and I waved back.  Who could have guessed this would become a treasured moment in a person’s day?

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You are watching or not paying attention to the news as much as you can stand to know what’s happening, or as much as you are trying to create some distance from the loss and fear. I’m not here to update you on the news. It’s everywhere.

But I think of this. Movies, television, and books have trained us to think that war and catastrophe are events that begin, ensue, occur, and then end.  War is guys in uniforms blasting away at each other. War is terrified women running for their lives with their babes in their arms. Catastrophe is the hurricane bashing, the flood spilling, the fire cascading down a mountainside. 

All these things are true. But we forget that calamity is also the little stuff.  How we get our food. What we tell our teenagers when they want to go out, but they can’t. How we decide who gets to watch what on TV tonight. The half-baked art projects we try to do with the grandkids. The extra lullabies and stories for our littlest ones. It’s waving at people we don’t know who wave back, because it feels so good to acknowledge each other. It’s virtual church and facetiming friends and the incredible amount of touching and funny stuff on Facebook and Twitter.

We are coping, observing, and changing. All of us together.