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It appears given the days since my last entry, this blog is currently bi-annual.\u00a0 But with Covid-19 turning most everything we perceived as our reality upside down, I feel I have an excuse for my lapse in sharing my occasional musings. If we have learned nothing else in the last ten or so months, it is that life can turn on a dime. I mean with back flips and more fanfare than we have ever wanted from the vicious, heinous, invader we call Covid-19.<\/p>\n
It is an unrelenting enemy.\u00a0 It will take all it can and then when you think you don’t have another cell left to surrender, it will invade that with a mutated version of itself. This virus has affected our hearts, our souls, our jobs, our schools, our social lives, our politics, our family lives. We can’t take a breath without thinking of it. Take a step without worrying about it.\u00a0 Our fight or flight instincts are constantly on high alert.\u00a0 In pre-Covid days, we said “bless you” when someone sneezed.\u00a0 Now we bolt in the opposite direction and ask if the perpetrator is sick? Have you been swabbed<\/em>? Is that a N95<\/em> mask or is it just your t-shirt pulled over your nose?<\/p>\n But beyond the social distancing, the masks, the hand washing, the constant vigilance to avoid infection, we must remember what we were before this virus entered our lives and what we can be after we are vaccinated and God willing Covid-19 fades into the background or on to future history books.<\/p>\n We will return to being social beings. We will touch, we will hug, we will kiss, we will wipe tears. We will mourn the confounding loss of human life, the families with an empty chair at the dinner table. We will share their loss. Some of us may suffer our own. We will grieve with our friends, we will grieve for strangers, we will grieve for our nation.<\/p>\n But how will we talk? What words will we use?\u00a0 Our vocabulary is so permeated with Covid-19 jargon, will we ever speak normally again? What will we mitigate <\/em>if we are mingling freely with no social distance<\/em>?\u00a0 Will we go back to flattening the curves<\/em> with Spanx? Will we ever describe anything as going viral<\/em> again? Will herd immunity<\/em> return to a concept for cattle with hoof and mouth disease? Will we ever again think of an aerosol<\/em> as an air freshener or hairspray?<\/p>\n These questions amuse me on good days but the prospect of using them as we did pre-Covid-19 fills me with hope. Our survival as a nation depends on a world where love, perseverence and doing the right thing for humanity, not just our own selfish needs or political views, prevails over the virus and the chaos we now find ourselves battling in our homes, our cities, our states.<\/p>\n I believe we will get there. But it takes the fortitude to overcome Covid fatigue<\/em> and avoid 2 a.m. doomsurfing<\/em> on the web and going back to good old healthy Amazon shopping that we forget by dawn what we bought. It will take ignoring fake news<\/em>, staying home, wearing masks and continuing our new normal\u00a0<\/em>until a new less daunting normal arrives.<\/p>\n But aside from all my optimism that we will get to the other side of this, I know it will never be the same as it was pre-Covid.\u00a0 And perhaps some of that is good. We will have to face the partisan ideologies and social climate that made this a politcal issue as much as a world health crisis. And if we are ever able to shake hands again, maybe just maybe, there can be some of that across the current divide.<\/p>\n These days I think often of Dickens’ famous opening lines to A Tale of Two Cities<\/em>.<\/p>\n “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief…it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”<\/p>\n It was a tale of class wars and an eventual spiritual resurrection.<\/p>\n I hope we can follow suit and with an abundance of caution<\/em>, get there.<\/p>\n I have a particularly precocious and loqucious four-year-old grandson.\u00a0 When I enter his house he often asks me, “What are you doing here?”\u00a0 And later “Why are you still here?”\u00a0 At first, I was taken back by his sassiness.\u00a0 And then I thought about the fact that I am there to help tutor his older brothers. His whole family are all there, every day. His parents are both working from home (WFH<\/em>) and his brothers are home schooled virtually. He no longer attends preschool. And I realized he may really be asking what I am doing there, too?<\/p>\n If all of this reversal of familiar norms confounds adults, what does a little guy with only four years under his belt think of our social isolation?\u00a0 The virus. The constant hand washing. The masked living.\u00a0 The fear of touching other human beings. The adults around him adjusting to ever-changing guidelines.<\/p>\n