Bandits at the grocery? No, just Karen and me in the homemade masks we wore for grocery shopping this morning, an expedition we now undertake only every other week. People are polite while abiding by the new “social distancing” ettiquet. For reasons largely psychological, every roll of toilet tissue and every paper towel have vanished from the shelves By contrast, regular gas is selling for $1.45 a gallon, two-thirds the price during the last Christmas season. People are grabbing hold of something that will insure that at least one resource is securely in the cubbard or closet. Paper is the new collectable.
We are lucky to live in a rural subdivision where only a few adults seem to venture out to work, one a food service worker, one a technician servicing credit card machines, but most working from home, locked down with their kids, attacking those long neglected home repair projects, planting a garden or finally washing the caked-on spring pollen off their cars. In a way it is idyllic. People are at home with family, the one thing we most often complain we have too little time for. We are the lucky ones.
At a distance, are the circle of family and friends who are nurses, postal clerks, soldiers, grocers, fast food employees serving only take-out and truckers wearing out the road to keep us fed, keep us stocked with food, lugging parts for the air conditioners and impulse shopping items from Amazon.
If we allow ourselves to become distraught over the risks they are taking, especially if we share too much of our concern with them, we do them a disservice and weaken their resolve to do what they have deemed important, essential, necessary. We can thank them-that’s why the internet was invented of course and why cell phones are a necessity for most of us. These sometimes annoying messengers carry the best wishes and concerns once carried by expensive long distance calls and by mailed letters. We can be thankful that in these times, technology can serve us instead of the other way around.
Mail order shopping has replaced all the major sports as our national pasttime. Spring training for baseball fans and the week-long drama of the Augusta Master’s Golf Tournament have been put on hold indefinitely. Six o’clock PM presidential press briefings have become the norm. Funerals with few or no morners, deathbed scenes played out without the comfort of family. Exhausted heath care providers. Its all the new normal.
Its a good time to keep a diary if you are so inclined. How we live and manage to survive the new normal will be of interest, maybe even an inspiration, to our children when they are adults. Our lives are enriched not only by the good times we share , but also by our times of testing.